PriorBlog

This morning on the bus, some of my fellow riders were discussing their jobs as customer service reps for a giant collection agency.  I don’t normally listen in on other people’s conversations on the bus, but at one point one of the women began raising her voice as she inveighed against an absent co-worker.  The highlight of her idiotic and at various times self-conflicting tirade was this quote: 

“This is the easiest job I ever had.  All I do is sit there all day and have people talk shit to me on the phone.  How can you complain about a job that easy?”

Another co-worker, this one present in the seat next to her, wearing a jacket with the words “Apple Bottoms” emblazoned on the back, concurred with this evaluation of the job’s difficulty.

It would be unfair of me to suggest that all of the conversations on the bus are on par with this one.  In fact, a lot of the dumber things I hear do not enter my ears on the bus, but rather at work, where, for instance, yesterday I learned that postal workers had the day off because it was a “national day of grievance.”

Quick aside: I realize I am coming off as snobby, so please allow me a quick self-deprecating anecdote to even things out.  The other day I stuck my sugar covered finger in my mouth after eating Christmas cookies.  I had forgotten that about five minutes before I had shoved that same finger in my ear to wiggle out some earwax.  The taste was beyond nasty and I almost threw up.

To resume where I left off, I realize that not all of the people on the bus are morons, but you do hear a lot of idiotic things said on it.  A big reason for this is that the smarter people tend to keep to themselves, whereas the people with obvious mental disabilities tend to speak out. 

Examples?  Why not, it’s always fun to make fun of crazy people.  There’s Rueben.  This guy is a doughy Stop and Shop worker with a large head and a larger voice.  His MO is to spot the best looking woman on the bus, sit next to her, and then let her know about what movies he’s seen in the past week.  My guess is that he must watch ten to twenty thousand movies a day.  Interspersed between these reviews he throws in little tidbits of information such as, “I’m a really nice guy, a friendly guy.”  Amazingly, most of the women are very kind to him, probably because his manner of speaking, which lacks a certain basic understanding of, shall we say, normal people elocution, reveals him to be an insane madman, and I guess they are enamored with his passion. 

Then there’s the little guy with the pouty lips and the Bird-era Celtics jacket.  This guy likes to talk to everybody but me.  If nobody wants to talk to him, he yawns loudly and repeatedly the entire ride.  The reason he doesn’t like me has to do with a snowstorm we had about two or three years ago.  He came up to me at the bus stop and said something like, this is a lot of snow and it’s cold, to which I responded with a half-ironic, ‘ah, it’s not so bad.’  This set him off, and unfortunately for me, it did so right about the same time the bus was pulling up.  Once inside, brimming with that type of agitation only a crazy person could have, he let the bus driver know that “There’s three feet of snow on the ground and this guy over here tells me ‘it’s not so bad!’”  And then to the people in the handicapped seats:  “That guy over there thinks this storm’s not so bad!”  And then to himself, for another ten to fifteen stops, I could hear him muttering over and over “not so bad.”

Although there are other far less entertaining conversations on the bus that I don’t listen to or catalog due to a lack of interest, it’s the truly wacked out conversations I use to define my experience with the 34E.  Part of it has to do with the brusqueness, with the eruptive spasms of a loud mouth that not only force you to listen, but in many cases remember.  Yesterday, was the first day of the new fare increases, and as such there were a fair (no pun intended) share of eruptive spasms from the bus riders.  The best of which came from this guy who got on at Beech Street.  A bunch of his buddies were unaware of the fare increases and were having difficulty coming up with finding the extra sixty cents necessary for getting on.  Of course, they were all loudly complaining and cussing (i.e. using words like fuck and shit), and that’s when, our guy, who previously seemed like simply a conductor of the others’ complaints, began his own riff, railing against the T and their budget problems with pinpoint precision with all of the confidence, all of the assumed accuracy of an economic expert.  At the same time, he threw in just the right amount of “motherfuckers” to keep a very strong populist verve alive among his cohorts and the other passengers.  In short, he was delightfully charismatic.  Had he gotten on at DeSoto instead of Beech the bus driver might have ended up swinging like Saddam on a Friday night.