The Bus Driver Correlation

I am a regular public transit user. Living in a city that has a decent transit system, it is an easy way to get from point A to point B without the headaches of negotiating traffic. The downside? I have to deal with bus drivers. Now, there are some bus drivers who are perfectly lovely (and, as I have note, largely imported from Nova Scotia). There are also some who are fine, neither good or bad, but do their job effectively. Then there are the bad bus drivers - the ones who speed, jam on the breaks, drive by you in the freezing cold (even when there is still room on the bus), and are generally unpleasant. I can handle those ones. What I can't handle are the bus drives who hit on me. If it was a one time thing, I could overlook it. But this has happened to me on more than one occasion.

Sometimes it is completely harmless, like last week when the bus driver told me how beautiful I was, in French. I initially thought this was something he did for all the women who got on the bus, but, as it turns out, I'm the only one he said it to on the entire (very busy) trip.

Other times, it is something a little more serious, but I'm still able to laugh it off. A couple of years ago, the regular bus driver I had at the time asked me to go to his Christmas party with him (and yes, it was a serious invitation). I politely refused and things were fine.

But then, there are those incidents that just haunt you for life. I was in the habit of taking the bus to work at the same time every day. This meant that I pretty much always had the same bus driver. Now, I'm the kind of person who says good morning (or good afternoon, whatever the case may be) when I get on the bus, and thank you when I get off. I'm also a fairly happy person, so I'm usually smiling. One day, after riding the same bus to work every day for about two months, I was getting off at my regular stop when I suddenly realized that the bus driver had followed me off. He came right up to me, handed me a folded piece of paper, and got back on the bus. Walking into work, I unfolded the paper and, to my surprise, there was a poem there, entitled "Dreaming Pillow". It read, in part:

Send me the pillow you dream on,
So that I may dream on it too.
Send me the pillow you dream on,
Don't you know I'm watch you?

It continued in that vein for a few more stanzas, concluding with "I hope some day to go out with you" plus the guys name and phone number. Needless to say, I switched buses after that.

Life Lesson: When taking public transit, you never know what your bus driver is going to be like. Be prepared for anything!