hanging out with davemacdonald

Tonight I did something I always aim to avoid and that’s to take a West Coast Express train or transit past 5:30PM from Vancouver to Maple Ridge. The WCE is great, but after 5:30, there’s a 6:20PM train along with 7PM and 8PM buses that just don’t line up with a bus that gets me home in good time (I live about 10 blocks too far east for regular connections, apparently, but there stands a chance for improvement this year…).

So tonight it was the 7PM bus from downtown and the Translink bus didn’t get me home. It dropped me off about three-quarters of the way home at Haney Place Mall. The guy in the seat in front of me, probably 19 or 20, was passed out when I got off the bus. I left the driver to sort things out as he was heading to the back already. Here’s the driver’s process as far as I can tell:

1. Stand approximately 1-foot from the passed out fellow and announce loudly that it’s the last stop. Repeat two times.
2. Call the mothership and request a loud speaker message on the bus.
3. Listen to the following loud speaker message: “Passenger on 701 Haney Place Bus 7376. This is the bus’s final stop. Please leave the bus.” That’s based on memory and may not be word for word, but you see the tone.
4. The passenger didn’t move so the driver left the bus and headed across the street. He headed towards the police station, but who knows where he went.

So a passenger who got off the bus with me chatted about the situation a bit and we got on the driver-abandoned, still-running bus and connected with the fellow who had passed out. Checking his pulse woke him up and I suggested he leave his empty beer bottle on the bus lest he be talked to about drinking in public. Once he was awake, he was good to go – no ambulance or drunk tank needed.

So the driver walks through the bus after we remarked that we took care of things for him and he kicks the bottle along, out the back of the bus and into the gutter where it breaks. He closes the back door and walks back to his seat. I called him out and he came to the front door of the bus. Our conversation went exactly as follows:

Me: “Hey, do you live here in Maple Ridge?”

Driver: “No..”

Me: “I do and I don’t accept you kicking that bottle out, breaking it on my street and leaving it there.”

Driver: “I didn’t think it would break…”

Me: “People collect cans and bottles from garbage cans all over the Lower Mainland – even leaving it unbroken in the gutter is unacceptable. If you don’t clean that, I will report you.”

Driver: “I didn’t know it would break…”

Me; “I don’t care.”

So he cleaned it up with some newspapers like he’d get 85 different diseases if he touched it with his hands. He tried to leave some shards, but we watched closely and he felt compelled to clean as much as he could.

I was so incredibly disappointed by his response across the board. From treating the guy on the bus like a danger (seriously, he was passed right out) to littering in a city because he just didn’t care – it was rotten. I know bus drivers get paid all right, but I assume there’s more to the job than driving the bus – if this guy executed his job description to the best of his ability, they’re surely overpaid.

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