the king has left the building...

i'm still wondering about the inevitibility of my promotion to the king of breakdowns... i was talking with kim the other day (or little kim as smurf calls her, he has a nickname for everyone, though i've yet to hear mine...) and she said that she was the queen of breakdowns, well, i said, here's your king. in addition to the blowout on the lie, the brake fire, the ezpass flying from the top of the bus way back in training to hit the upper window with a dull crack that had convinced us that it was a bird flying into the bus until the first tollbooth ezpass sign read bluntly and mysteriously, 'contact ezpass...' a few weeks back i had left the garage with the best intentions of just driving down to new york when the twin warning lamps that you don't want to see on a bus panel illumined themselves, check engine and stop engine... the bus took the decision out of my hands when five seconds later the bus decided to shut off and nicely come to a cruising slow halt on a median before the thruway entrance.
buses decide to take their fate into their own hands often apparently deciding that the operator cannot see fit to not run them into the ground. i think that its a wise choice. i had another bus stall out on me at the garage parking lot as i was setting it up for the inevitable trip to new york. no, the bus said, i don't feel up to it and stalled out ten minutes into its idle like a troublesome child who decides to fall asleep at the breakfast table. that was a bus that i was bringing to the terminal to relieve a driver whose bus had a serious oil leak from a hub. i showed up with a second bus to discover the oil leak was a good twelve inch puddle. if i hadn't started out driving this before the mechanical failure i at least chalked it up on my scoreboard as yet another broken/ breaking down bus that i got to drive back to the garage.
i'm still being asked the questions that i thoroughly cannot answer. maybe it is something about the way that i look, that i seem to be a good candidate for know it all. i stood near the dispatchers gate doing a crossword puzzle when in the space of three or four minutes i was asked how to get to silver springs, maryland, syracuse, binghamton and where to get change for a dollar... i almost had an answer for that last one...