The Bus Driver Breakdown

Every so often while riding around this fair city one is confronted by the absolute madness of a bad bus driver. Now in all bus drivers’ defense, most are quite capable and drive splendidly to get you where you need to go. And considering that I see driving in this city a torture worse than water boarding, capable, let alone splendid, is an amazing feat. However, there is a select group of drivers that have taken a secret oath as profound and clandestine as the Illuminati.

This society of bad and terribly annoying bus drivers have the power to completely ruin your commute and, if commuting is that much a part of your life, your day. Headaches, back aches, and stomach aches be damned in the opinion of the following three groups of bus drivers. And death to those that wish to read or sleep or just ignore that they’re traveling at all, for why should those on the bus be free of the toil that is the red brake lights of Hondas, Fords, Caddys or Benz’, which the bus driver must face dead on.

The three groups can be broken down as follows: the Excessive Breaker, the Overly Eager, and the Slow Boi.

The Excessive Breaker, to me, is the most annoying of the three. These bus drivers have an outlook on life that involves intense fear of heights, umbrellas, hail, escalators, and satellite TV, to name a few. This fear drives them to the brink of insanity and makes them think the world has a specific death wish for them. This in turn causes an all out dependency on the brake so if at any point the bus seems to be going a moderate, never fast, speed, he/she will slam down the break peddle with paranoia like intensity throwing any and all off balance—many times into the hapless body of another.

Now if you’re the daydreaming kind as I am and have passed the time by thinking about accidentally running into a beautiful French woman who consequently decides you’re the perfect human, then this whole bouncing around might seem appealing. But though I concede that the potentiality of getting thrown into the arms of a foreign exchange student with a desire for the clumsy increases when such a scared driver is behind the wheel, the annoyance of being jerked forward every two minutes is no longer worth it.

So I say to those who are so unfortunate to encounter this type of driver whom throws the breaks down with abrupt and unnecessary madness, forget about the French and hold on!

The second is what is known as the Overly Eager driver. These drivers work within the same irrational boundaries as the breaking maniacs above, but instead of fear for the physical dangers of life, they fear the existential. Boredom, depression, and the death of God in modern society are what drive their everyday existences. Though different in what ails them, the two groups of drivers are nearly equally annoying. Where as the breaker sends you reeling forward every time you try and look at your book, these eager beavers send you backwards.

So worried about their place in the universe, they fear that if one sits still for even a second the shadow demons of inevitability will overtake them and drag what’s left of their souls to WHO KNOWS WHERE? Therefore they keep their foot at attention hovering just above the accelerator so that if the car ahead so much as inches forward the instinctual spasm in the driver’s tibialis anterior will cause the bus to jump forward that same inch. To lose such ground would be to lose sanity.

Where as the previous two could compete for top honors as most annoying, the Slow Boi easily comes in third. Granted the break down of best to worst when judging something so passionately annoying is relative, I’ve been so annoyed by the mega brakes and heavy accelerating in four foot jerks that the Slow Boi can sometimes be welcoming. Now I’d still much prefer the drivers outside of any of these groups but if you have to choose a best of the worst, here’s our Ernie Banks.

The Slow Boi is just that. Slow. He/She is anti lane change, anti acceleration (gradual or jerky), and anti opening the doors while waiting at a stop light on the opposite side of the street from where the stop is located while thirty people watch helplessly as their transfer drives off. Fully loaded Dump trucks pass by on clouds of iron as the Slow Boi creeps along and waits to get around the cars parked at the meters (illegally or otherwise).

I’ve seen the Bugs Bunny cartoon where he races the tortoise and whoopee, the tortoise wins, but the tortoise never had to deal with LA traffic, and suffice to say, Bugs would probably be much like the Overly Eager above. However, because the driving of the Slow Boi is no way jerky, slow but at least smooth, one can ignore the whole experience with a book, a magazine, a nap or just a quality bout of staring off into nothing. And such is the reason why the Slow Boi wins in the best of the worst category.

Now you might ask yourself, “What can I do?” Should I write my senator or my locally elected official? Should I write Metro? Should I picket and sound off my annoyance with each ride I partake with one of these bus drivers? The answer is of course no. Sorry, it probably won’t do any good but at least you now have a label to blame your headache on. And what’s a world with labels anyhow?