Where Are Your Bus Ride Manners?

I’ve befriended the manager of the Sungai Petani bus station. He is this old retired army dude who sports a long beard ..and all his hair seems to go on the lower part of his face and he is pretty bald at the top. However, he is quite a nice guy.

He speaks relatively fluent English as compared to his colleagues(bus drivers, bus conductors, ticket sellers) and he likes to kid around and stuff. Your parents might ask you to stay away from him lah, but we keep our distance even though his harmless. So yeah, he gave me his number so that I can call him whenever I want him to book tickets for me in advance.

As convenient as that sounds, he is not all that reliable. We had to wait for like 1 hour because the bus that he booked for us, was full. We won’t call from him the next time already. Somemore before this we were so touched that he was damn kind to us and even wanted to buy oranges for him as a small gesture. But he is still nice lah.

Every bus ride to KL or back from KL is an adventure for me. (this time around when I go back to Sungai Petani, I’ll be boarding a bus from Malacca, hopefully it makes things different). Usually the journey takes 5 to 6 hours and today surprisingly, it was only 4 and a half hours!

But there’s always one problem or another when I take the bus. It’s never a smooth one.

Let me share with you a list of the many situations that can piss the shit out of me:-

1) Bus breakdown
2) Bus stopping too many times
3) Bus driving so slow that I can just hop off, walk for abit, take some photos and hop back in.
4) Noisy children. Who should be thrown off the bus. I’m serious. I’m a rather nice person, even you, a person with average tolerance for shit-happens-type of situations would vomit blood.
5) Blasting aircon
6) Non working aircon.
7) Bumpy bus ride.
8) Long long hours.
9) Noisy television or radio
10) Old uncle and aunties who don’t know how to use their handphones and think that just because they cannot hear themselves talk on the handphone, the person on the other line can’t hear them as well hence the need to shout so that the entire bus can hear.
11) Reclining of the seats in front of me.

And today number 11 happened.

When we went up the bus, we were horrified by how little leg space the bus had. But we thought, it’s okay lah. Since all we want is to go home right.

Then, in the seat in front of ours was this middle age uncle who was reading the papers, with his seat reclined a long way to the back. We couldn’t possibly made our way into the seats and he didn’t even bother to notice that we were standing there, waiting for him to raise his seat. We had to ASK him.

We were not that annoyed yet lah. Before we drifted off to sleep, we saw that he was reading the New Straits Time, which meant that he was English educated. It was rather odd because you seldom see old uncles reading english newspaper in Sungai Petani. Then we heard him conversing on the phone in English, just like the way you and I would speak to each other.

He was about my dad’s age and was dressed rather respectably.

However, despite us telling him a few times to not lower his seats so much, he finally got angry at us.

It happened when I told him off for the last time when he reclined his seat onto my legs and woke me up from my sleep.

I’ll put up an audioblog about how it happened. Listen.

Damn annoying. But I was really pissed at him lah because I hate it that he felt it was his RIGHTS to lower his seat onto my legs. I mean at least have the decency to feel embarrassed that you encroached into my leg space, no? Damnit.

I was shooting the third finger behind his head so many times out of anger. Lie Yuen said “This is an example of talking bad about people behind people..wahhaha”. hehe.

Well, rule number 1 when you sit on the bus: Always be aware if your chair doesn’t take up other people’s leg space. It’s called etiquette.

Secondly, a man of my father’s age, who speaks good english, who cares about the business section in the paper(Tax for Halal food reduced? At least that’s what I saw when I peeked over his shoulders when he was reading the papers)… should at least own a car right because at that age you would have gotten a decent job?

I’m not going to pull a Wee Shu Min upon myself and rant about the fact that he should be rich enough at that age to be able to afford a plane ticket back. Somemore now Air Asia so cheap.

But I would think that most middle class middle age man would own a car and would not like the hassle that only an interstate bus ride can bring. Clearly he found the bus ride to be abit of a hassle as he wasn’t too happy about the reclining of his seats right?

So he is supposedly older, educated…and yet he raised his voice at a girl young enough to be his youngest brother’s daughter.(Don’t think he is old enough to be my grandfather). Some people really don’t know their manners. No wonder so old also no car to drive lah.

I hate my bus rides. I hate my bus rides. I hate hate hate.

See what I mean? Asshole. 🙁 and in this photo, he was in the toilet and THIS was after he raised his seat after I told him off.