--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> miles from where most of the relatives live. No one
> disorderly on the
> bus -- unless you count the leg-room between seats
> as violence.
[WS:] A few years ago (after 9/11) I rode a Grehoud bus heading from DC to upstate NY. There were several people of Middle Eastern descent on the bus. A redneck in a T-shirt with Amerikan flag logo started making comments about the Middle Easterners that grew nastier and then changed to thinly veiled threats. At certain point I could not stand it, and I turned to the redneck and told him to shut the fuck up or otherwise I would call the cops and press charges for making terroristic threats. He complied, perhaps because he thought that I was an undercover cop, and one of the Middle Easterners thanked me for taking a stand.
On another occcasion, I was on a Greyhound bus heading for Harrisburg, PA. Among the passengers was a Black woman and a bratty kid that was throwing tantrums. That was going on for a while, and then the driver - a burly scary-looking Black guy, stopped the bus and told the kid in the stern voice to shut up. The kid look at him and started screaming even louder - clealry unimpressed by the driver's request.
On still another occassion, I was waiting for a Greyhound bus in the dilapidated Baltimore bus station. The bus was late, as usually, nobody knew when it would arrive, but the passengers were asked to stay inside the station building. Next to me was a middle age blue collar couple going to Ocean City, MD - that dream holiday destination of lower middle /working class folk from the area. Their bus was late too. At some point, the guy decided to get more information from the station staff. To his dismay he learned that the Ocean City bus already departed - but nobody bothered to inform the passengers waiting for that bus.
I will not even mention minor arguments between passengers and the Greyhound staff that seemed to be a routine part of the Greyhound experience. Greyhound does suck really bad.
Wojtek