I wrote a post some indeterminate time ago about King County Metro’s online compilation of customer complaints against its drivers and their behaviors, which number in the many thousands every year. Some of them are mine (maybe .02 percent); my complaints are almost always prefaced by me following the rules of bus stop etiquette, and postscripted when a driver willfully disobeys them to make some nebulous political point. I don’t play that. On the other hand, I have no patience for passengers who break rules, like talking loud on cell phones or not employing ear phones when listening to music I dislike intensely.
So it was last week that I observed an incident in which I was not involved, but along with almost every other passenger was effected by for reasons that in very little time here will be shown to have had the pretense of high motivation, but in the end were shown to be inspired by the lowest of motivation. I didn’t know all the facts when it started; it came to my attention when people around me started to become irritated when the bus failed to move from a stop for several minutes, apparently because the driver was engaged in a “discussion” with a person who was trying to get on the bus. The man was gesticulating wildly and otherwise quite animated; it was obvious he was being refused entry and he was trying to argue his way on. After about ten minutes of this, a passenger decided to go to the front of the bus and attempt to mediate the dispute. After speaking to man to apparent effect the passenger went back to his seat; he stated that the man was claiming that the bus driver had “disrespected” him, and shared the opinion that the driver was a “racist.” I asked the passenger what the driver had done to excite this man, but he had no explanation; he and a “bro” commiserated on the need to “show” that driver that he couldn’t get away with doing what hadn’t quite been explained yet. And so we were just going to sit here until what? The man upfront was still making his “point”—but to what purpose? What did he expect to be the end result? Why didn’t the driver just tell him to sit down and shut-up?
As the minutes turned into a half-hour of just sitting there going nowhere, eventually a Metro supervisor showed-up, and all this did was create more havoc and disarray. I did hear a snippet that suggested that the man was upset because the driver tried to take his bus transfer. Now, the driver is authorized to take a passenger’s transfer under certain conditions, like the transfer being expired or the wrong color for the day. The supervisor, a short female and not the sheriff deputy that should have been summoned, relented out of trepidation and allowed the man to take a seat; however, he continued to be insufferable about the “disrespect” he supposedly endured, until another passenger near him “asked” him to be put a lid on it so that we could get going.
After a few minutes, the new passenger went to the back of the bus to commiserate with his “brothers,” who were all very supportive of his “cause.” Another person of initially indeterminate gender who had been listening in on the original harangue advised that there were better ways to put his opinions across, but she was casually dismissed in an admittedly patronizing manner. But the truth eventually dribbled out of his mouth. The driver had “disrespected” him by trying to take his transfer out of his hand. Why did this upset him so? Because, as the passenger admitted, his transfer had expired. So why was he making such an argumentative fuss? Because he was trying to prevent the driver from seeing that his transfer had expired. And why wouldn’t he want the driver to see that his transfer had expired? Because he didn’t want to pay the fare.
So now the truth was out: The man was trying to deflect attention away from the fact he was trying to break the rules, and he was deceitfully using claims of “disrespect” and “racism” to cow the driver into letting him board the bus without paying the fare. I became angry when I determined these things, and I demanded of man to explain why he would inconvenience a bus load of passengers who needed to be somewhere just because he didn’t want to obey the rules. If there was any “disrespect” going on, it was his toward all the passengers on this bus. His “brothers” told me to stay out of it, because I didn’t know what I was talking about; I retorted that it might be helpful if they actually listened to how this man just discredited his own story, before allowing themselves to be made a fool in front of everyone by this arse.
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