Why can't Greyhound be like this? Yeah, I know what you're saying - "BLARG THAT'S A PARTY BUS GREYHOUND CAN'T DO THAT". I humbly disagree, for I believe that a party can happen anywhere. Even on an inter-city bus. Inter-city buses are where they need parties the most.
But I digress – that’s not what I’m apologizing for.
Last week’s update wasn’t just mediocre, it was an outright slap in the face to what little journalistic integrity I pretend to have. It wasn’t hard hitting and it wasn’t of any use to you, the reader – for that I apologize. Last week’s update was a Friday insert in the Flihova County High School Newspaper, a tongue in cheek essay about the eccentricities of bus travel that, in some circles, could be seen as an advertisement for Greyhound. Nowhere in my update did I attempt to smack the reader in the face with the slimy dead salmon of The Truth; nowhere did I dig deep into the Subject Matter soil with my Word Shovel and painstakingly excavate the much heralded Story Behind The Story, nowhere did I grasp that glistening, ambiguous mass and hold it upward toward the light for all to behold. You must accept my apologies for subjecting you to such one dimensional, lazy, I Love The 80s Strikes Back material. I hope that I can somehow remedy the situation by finishing today the job I started this past Wednesday. Allow me to open with a joke:
The Greyhound Bus Company walks into a bar. The bartender says,
“Hey! We’ve got a drink named after you!”
The Greyhound Bus Company says,
“Wow! You’ve got a drink named ‘Bunch Of Good-For-Nothing, Limp-Dick, Pissant Motherfuckers’!?”
“Ho ho,” You chortle to yourself. “Truman’s using hyperbole once again to prove his mild dissatisfaction with Greyhound.” No, sorry, that’s not it at all. I choose my words carefully (not enough people say pissant anymore, wouldn’t you agree?) and I mean every one of them – Greyhound is a wholeheartedly corrupt entity which ought to be destroyed for the good of all mankind, preferably by sending a couple of pro wrestlers to infiltrate their headquarters and blow shit up a la They Live.
Maybe my understanding of capitalism is flawed. I will admit that I’m not good at economics, but I thought that it was reasonable for me to expect that, when I spend $24 on a bus ticket from Eugene to Portland on August 20th, 2008, departure time 6:20 PM, that I can expect to end my day on a Greyhound bus heading north. That’s how I think it works. I didn’t spend $24 to not ride a Greyhound, and yet, that is exactly the experience Greyhound provided me with. So maybe that’s what they’re doing now; maybe, instead of being a company that gives people rides on buses, Greyhound is a company that doesn’t give people rides on buses. Maybe that’s their thing. Perhaps Greyhound just really likes dicking good people over, and when there are no good people left to dick over, then they dick people like me over. I suppose that business plan has some merit – God knows it works for Wal*Mart.
My friend dropped me off at the Eugene Greyhound station at 5:00 PM, well over an hour before my bus was due to leave, as the pissants at Greyhound advised. Things got off to a bad start right away when I saw a sign explaining that the 6:20 Greyhound to Portland was going to be two hours late. And yeah, that sucked – it sucked like a chest wound inflicted by a gun that shoots black holes – but I realized that complaining loudly to everyone in the bus station about it would do nothing to get the bus there any faster. Thereafter, when I complained loudly to everyone in the bus station, I did it purely for my own entertainment.
I sat in the Greyhound station for an hour and a half until the ticket agent received a phone call and announced to us that our bus had stopped in Medford – a full two hours away – and the driver was refusing to go any further, saying that there was something wrong with his bus. Now, I’ve got to agree with the bus driver, because there was something wrong with his bus: It was being operated by Greyhound. Never before have I encountered a company this old that still sucks as badly at what it does. I mean, I’m not going to go and say that it’s easy to run a bus line, but I imagine that after doing it for 93 chuffing years I’d have most of the kinks worked out.
So, at this point, Greyhound has made a pretty big fumble. They’re operating a bus with mechanical problems driven by an employee lacking the suitable Man Parts™ to shepherd his malfunctioning eight-ton rolling freakshow through the rest of his route – clearly, affirmative action has forced Greyhound to start hiring mega-weenies. Sometimes the cooling unit in the soft-serve machine breaks, but do I stop making milkshakes? No! I sack up and I do my fucking job!
Greyhound went for damage control, and shortly thereafter we were informed that a replacement bus was being sent out. However, since the Oregon Greyhound headquarters is in Portland and the malfunctioning bus (and its passengers) was in Medford, some 273 miles away, the replacement bus would have to travel south all the way across the state to Medford, pick up the abandoned passengers there, and then resume the route all the way back up to Portland. The ticket agent helpfully told us that this would mean our bus would be here in “about eight hours, at 3:00 AM”, and then reminded us that the bus station closed at 9:00 PM, so we’d have to wait outside.
And, oh yes, it was raining.
I cashed in my ticket for a refund, used the money to buy a ticket on the 5:30 AM Amtrak train to Portland the next morning, and then walked 12 blocks in the rain to a Courtesy Inn near the train station and, thanks to my parents’ willingness to part with $60.00, got a room for the night. The next morning I walked through downtown Eugene at 5:00 AM to the train station, and was mercifully not eaten by hobos. The train arrived right on time, there was plenty of space, and nobody had vomited/urinated/given birth in my seat within at least the last month. While I arrived in Portland well on time, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the other Greyhound passengers in the station are still waiting for their bus to show up.
Here’s the moral of the story: Greyhound is absolutely the worst way to get anywhere. If you have a choice between taking a Greyhound to your destination or riding a unicycle made out of flaming velociraptors, I’d advise you to think carefully – both options have significant drawbacks, but I have yet to post an update deriding unicycles, velociraptors, or fire. Simply put, Greyhound will not get you where you want to go in a timely fashion; in some cases, it won’t even get you where you want to go.
Here’s a fine alternative for you: Use Amtrak. The only reason I wasn’t using Amtrak in the first place was because none of their trains or buses ran at convenient times for me. At first I was pissed at Amtrak for forcing to ride Greyhound because they’d scheduled all of their trips for the late afternoon on the day that I wanted to arrive early, or the early morning on the day I wanted to leave late, but in light of my recent experiences I’m actually okay with what they did. I’ve come to accept that, if you choose to travel somewhere, you’re basically asking to get dicked by a corporation at some point. Airlines dick you with security, car travel dicks you with fuel prices, and Greyhound dicks you with false advertising. Amtrak, however, dicks you with inconvenient scheduling, and while this still constitutes being dicked, I find it the most preferable way to be dicked in the travel process. Amtrak does not force you through draconian security measures or cost you an arm and a leg, and in my experience it’s been pretty clean and reliable, unlike Greyhound. Yes, they do schedule their trains and buses at times that aren’t necessarily convenient for me, but I can deal with that. It’s not a last minute surprise dicking that leaves me stranded in Eugene for the night – it’s the sort of dicking that I can anticipate and have time to prepare for, and if you’ve got to get dicked, that’s the best way to have it happen.
So that’s what I think of Greyhound.
Truman Capps will admit that Amtrak also dicked him with a $2.00 bagel.
10 comments:
Truman Capps is sounding awfully perturbed...
You shut your mouth. Truman Capps' hair is a man among men.
A. If it is any consolation to you, this event was no picnic for Greyhound either. Consider:
1. They had to repair their bus either
a. At a commercial repair shop in Medford, probably more expensive than in their own shop; or
b. After having it towed to their own shop, probably a lot more expensive than the extra cost of doing the repair in Medford.
2. They had to pay another driver to drive down to Medford and finish the route.
3. They had the extra fuel cost to drive the replacement bus to Medford and the original to Portland after the repair.
4. They had a busload of unhappy customers, some of whom may well have been less polite than Truman Capps.
5. In exchange for all this hassle they received no additional revenue, and, at least in your case, lost revenue that they otherwise would have received.
If Greyhound management is really incompetent enough that events like this occur frequently, if this was not the result of an unpredictable malfunction in a well-maintained bus, then Greyhound will soon be out of business.
B. However angry you are with Greyhound management, however much you need to vent about this experience, you should not malign the driver for not continuing to drive a broken and possibly dangerous bus. If he had gone on, where might the bus have finally broken down completely? Probably not in a place like Medford with with reasonable resources for stranded passengers, but somewhere on I5 many miles from nowhere. Indeed, if he had gone on, if he had reached Eugene and picked up passengers there, perhaps Truman Capps could have been one of those unhappy souls waiting in the dark for a replacement bus, perhaps somewhere between Halsey and Shedd; assuming, of course, that the breakdown did not cause the bus to do a triple somersault with five half-twists into a ravine. I imagine that your parents think they got a bargain for those sixty bucks.
C. In fact, for this essay, you owe that anonymous bus driver an apology. HE DID HIS JOB! He looked after the safety of his passengers by insisting that that bus could go no farther. If you have evidence that the driver had any responsibility for this event, try to salvage "what little journalistic integrity [you] pretend to have" by setting that evidence out clearly and objectively. Otherwise apologize for the libel and save your invective for company management.
Um...first of all...comment above me, what the fuck? You clearly are missing the point.
Additionally, I don't think I've ever seen the word "dicked" used so many times in such a short period of time. Good job.
I hate Greyhound. We've been through this. You will always have me as an ally in this fight.
Mr. Phantomspaz said that I am missing the point. That may well be true since, aside from blaming Greyhound specifically for all the well-known hassles of travel by bus, I am not sure what your point was. But, since at least one of your readers appears to have missed my points, I'll spell out one of them a little more plainly.
A few weeks ago Truman Capps published The Five Commandments of Food Service, based on his experiences as a restaurant employee, in which he asserted (I'm paraphrasing here) that customers should show common courtesy and thoughtfulness to the employees of a company who are providing goods and services to them and should apply some of their intelligence to understanding that the services are not provided by magic and to avoiding activities which actually interfere with the provision of those goods and services. Excellent points.
But now Truman Capps, as a customer, has published abuse of an employee of a different company, an employee he never met or observed and whose actions in the present matter were in all likelihood correct and perhaps even admirable. If there is any valid complaint here, it is about Greyhound management; abuse of the driver of the broken bus is out of place.
Apparently Truman Capps holds his customers to a standard to which Truman Capps does not hold himself when he is a customer of someone else.
Alright, alright, alright, Jesus.
Never does it warm a writer's heart more than when his readers start debating one another over the meaning of his work. Imagine how the authors of the Bible must feel.
I will admit that it was very insensitive of me to belittle the Greyhound driver for not continuing his trip in a bus he knew to be mechanically unsound. It was also insensitive of me to ask all Mexicans to stop speaking Spanish or to spontaneously stop believing in the existence of math and most of the economy. I'd love to pass my outlandish writings off as satire (God knows that's how Jonathon Swift got away with his rampant baby-eating habit) but that won't work here, as there's no deeper meaning to my update about dissatisfaction with Greyhound other than my dissatisfaction with Greyhound, constituting (at best) a single entendre.
I am not a satirist, and, despite my aforementioned devotion to journalistic integrity, I'm not a journalist either. I'm a bear wearing a tutu balancing on a rubber ball for your amusement (we are also known as "humorists"). I roar and swipe my paws around, but in the end it's all harmless, because I'm wearing a tutu. My chief purpose is to amuse, and in the previous update I tried to do so by picking on a person who makes a career out of driving a bus up and down the I-5 corridor. I bear him no ill will (no pun intended), and at no point did I seriously expect him to put his life or the lives of his passengers at risk in order to make my life more convenient. However, while writing the blog I did expect it to be hilarious when I pretended to be the insensitive sort that would demand exactly that from him, going so far as to compare his job to mine in terms of stress and responsibility. It was funny to me, and still is - but hey, sometimes the bear loses its balance and falls off the ball.
However, behind every great performing clown bear there is an animal handler with a shotgun, ready to put the bear out of its misery for the safety of the crowd should the bear's act get out of hand. Teflonicius is my animal handler - he keeps me on track and in line by holding me accountable. It's because of readers like him that I reread my material multiple times before posting, both to catch spelling errors and to ensure that my ideas, while funny, have a greater point, and do not simply degenerate into the next season of Family Guy.
I don't like Greyhound, but my problems lie with the management, not, as I may have indicated, with any individual driver. To that driver, I personally apologize - my comments were in jest. A representative from Hair Guy LLC will be contacting you soon to finalize the delivery of your $15 gift certificate at the Honeybaked Ham Store.
Truman, you are a god of writing...why aren't you famous yet...
OK. The Hair Guy is a comedic persona, a caricature of an ignorant, egocentric lout.
I considered a possibility like that and rejected it because the Hair Guy does not seem to be consistently loutish. Some days he seems thoughtful, leavened with a little self-deprecation. Other days he seems serious but acerbic about some branch of the writing art (but maybe I don't know enough about those genres to recognize the loutishness of his opinions on those days). Yet other times he talks in an amusing and inoffensive way about the ordinary hassles of life. Sure, he makes a lot of tiresome boob jokes (which, I acknowledge, many of the readers appear to relish), but that just seemed like a derigueur college-age motif.
Indeed, a point is generally discernible and often it is a good one. As for instance, in The Five Commandments. Yes there is a lot of exaggeration and thick sarcasm, but those keep the piece from being either preachy or plaintive. Four of the examples have the ring of authenticity. Even No. I, where you complain about customers not cleaning up after themselves, strikes a chord because a customer sometimes does leave behind a mess that one can't imagine making in the first place. So anyone who ever had such a job can appreciate the piece at face value. But in the midst of this you have No. III, which I suppose, in retrospect, is one of these little entertainments: the nonsense about customers taking the food from the tray themselves. This is like reading a horror story set in a picturesque but prosaic little New England town where everything is perfectly normal except [whatever]; but in the horror story one knows that something is going to be awry. Well, apparently things may be awry in the Hair Guy universe, too. But the uninitiated may well just conclude that the author is confused.
So in this Greyhound case, the Hair Guy just seemed irrationally and ballistically angry.
It's hard to see the tutu in the transcript.
And anyway, the shotgun is only loaded with tranquilizer darts. The bear will wake up with a hangover and live to perform another day.
Sorry, Ms. Phantomspaz. I just now looked at your Blogger profile and I see that in trying to be polite, I may actually have given offense. I'll have to be more careful about making assumptions from internet names.
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