shuttles and soup

a stranger from another charter busline and i by the name of greg, drove the stupidest charter that i have ever been on last night. usually charters are somethhing to be avoided at all costs which is why the extra board guys like myself find ourselves getting called in expecting a line run that we know and then get the dread chill of the unknown clamp around our heart when we are asked to stop by the office for charter orders. charter orders usually consist of a typewritten form with the pickup and dropoff times (which are frequently starting within an hour of when we are standing in the office wondering how in the hell am i getting this bus there?!?), a few mispelled contact names that we cannot get in contact with anyways on our restricted company cell phones, often incorrect and/or vague addresses and stapled to it, a map or two photocopied and either a miniature relief of the entire new york metropolitain area with a green highlighter scrawled across a few boroughs. if we traveling by plane at 30,000 feet, maybe this would help. or the map is a closeup of a neighborhood say, in brooklyn. fine for naviagting a few blocks, but where these blocks are connected to the outside world is impossible to say. but we always get a friendly don't worry, the passengers know where they are going and a good luck! from the dispatchers. that always seems like a charm that i would like to be able to rely upon because right then, i am never sure when or if i am getting back from this trip. but last night seemed easy enough. don't worry i was told, they will even feed you! its a charter to shuttle people back and forth from two hotels to a restaurant/food service/ trade show 5.3 miles away... close enough to drive there even if you are in town from across the state. trouble is, thats what people did, drove themselves while greg and i were told to do a continuous cycling back and forth for five hours. between us, we picked up 40 or 50 people in the first three hours and if that sounds like alot, consider the fact that my bus alone could have fit 52 people on board in one trip, with hours off sitting on the bus reading or enjoying a hot meal smoozing with the restauranteurs (who did nothing but tell me how good the food was after their night was over...), but instead i drove this course over and over again until i could drive it in my sleep (as i believe that i was for the last hour...). i logged in over 120 miles of traveling point A to point B. sort of like sysyphus... at least i wasn't doing this for an eternity, only what seemed like one. i think that i know what awaits bad bus drivers in hell.
in the men's room at my home terminal, there is always a struggle and agony to find out that the liquid soap dispenser hasn't soap in it when all you want to do is wash off the germs from the thousands of other drivers who have handled the steering wheel and just basically clean the grime and grease from your hands and the quarts of liquid quick drying disinfectant from the bus lavatories... and then find that there is never any soap in the dispenser. someone trying to be helpful, i suppose, scrawled in black sharpie on the top of the dispenser 'don't put any liquid soup in here...' fine, but how about SOAP?!? i suppose that they could have tried tomato soup that would help firm the skin and leave it feeling clean or maybe minestrone for basil-ly fresh hands...
a few weeks back, i was standing in the port, languishing, waiting when two nuns got off a bus, sounds like the beginning of a joke, right, but i wish that i had the punchline. they were normal enough nuns, black habits and crosses dangling from long chains, middle aged, long black skirts, conservative shoes, everything that you imagine a nun to be when you mentally conjure up a picture of a nun in your head. but, for one important fact. they each wore a bright yellow plastic inflatable child's swim ring around their necks. like i said, no punch line.
miscellaneous pet peeves. please don't park in the bus lane in the park and rides that are clearly marked 'buses only.' especially with your new ford explorer eddie bauer edition because you may think that its large, but when i pull up to find you in my way, you look like an ant... inconsequential and underfoot.
and please for the love of god, don't wait to burst through the gate at the port authority late, while i am backing 40,000 pounds of bus up in a confined space with literally millions of dollars of buses and equipment around me and expect for me to stop, or even notice you, because despite your frantic yells of 'hey, waitaminute...!' i won't.