#Huh???

Today is Saturday, so nothing about taking the bus was normal. Needed to go work in the studio at asu, so bus was the ride of choice. The trip to was uneventful - interesting collection of people, but nothing of singular significance. The ride home was a different scenario.

I got on at the usual place. A short ride south and the bus stopped for a lone woman at the next stop. The door opened, she stepped up into the bus and immediately gets in the driver's face, yelling, "That son of a bitch just drove by and didn't stop for me - I'm sick and tired of your f**king behavior ..." and went off on a bit(?) of a tangent. The driver, wisely, didn't say a word, and once her steam had burst she stomped on into the bus and landed on a seat. She removed a cell phone from her purse and made a call. The bus was noisy so she couldn't hear and she screamed into the phone as if her yelling somehow made her able to hear better. It was apparently not a friendly call - seemed to have something to do with driving or a car or insurance or something. She ended the call abruptly and sat and cried loudly for a few seconds. A woman who had been sitting next to her kept creeping away toward the front of the bus - anxiously looking for her stop.

While all this is going on, there's a man sitting next to me, very front of the bus, who is loudly announcing the cross streets and transfer lines. This is usually a function of the driver or the computerized lady voice - don't know if this guy was a bus driver on holiday or a seriously regular passenger. The driver and he talked, so I'm going with the driver-on-holiday theory. The angry phone lady yells up at the driver, "Does this bus go to Guadalupe?" He politely said, "yes it does." She moves to the front seat across from me and I can see she's a bit unkempt. I was thinking, maybe, given her agitated stated, she'd just run away from a domestic situation. We turned on Guadalupe but she didn't pull the cord to stop the bus. The way she'd asked the driver, I was sure she'd be off as soon as we got on it. We passed the first stop and she pulled the cord. When the driver came to the stop, she starts to get off and turns around, asking the driver if the bus follows the same route back? He told her yes, and she could cross the street and catch the bus in front of the high school. She then said, what number is this bus anyway and he told her, 66. As she takes her final step off the bus, the driver say, "Thank you for riding Tempe in Motion and have a Valley Metro day!" He closed the door and took off. He and the other guy start laughing and I'm giggling, too, as I never heard a driver say that before. He then told me he just wanted to aggravate her a bit since she dove on the bus, ragging on him about something some other driver supposedly did. The other guy told me he was pretty sure she had been drinking, which would explain a lot of her behavior. Hardly ever a dull moment on the bus.