You wanna be the Bus Guy? Part Deux. aka: Stupid people I encounter

I will ramble without any chronological pattern.

  • Someone shot at a busload of junior high kids yesterday. My neighbor the cop John was where the bus was pulled over. From the bus, one of the kids had called her mom to say the bus was pulled over because someone had a gun on the bus, and had shot a window blown out and the police weren’t letting anyone off. Mom shows up, and got arrested because she would NOT listen, and get the truth from me, the principal or any of the three cops on what was a very calm scene until she showed up. In between her yelling and trying to run on the bus, she knocked over a bus driver.

  • You. The man with the Pakistani name. With the 17 year old HS senior that is afraid to walk 400 freaking feetto a bus stop, in a fairly affluent neighborhood (median price in the $600 - $700K range) because of the neighbor’s dog, and because of the “shadows” and needs me to put a stop in front of your house? You’re an idiot. Your Precious has the shortest walk to your corner of any other kid on that stop. So, shut up. Now.

  • The bus aide here whose husband is a building engineer at one of the high schools, and for some reason sees nothing wrong with him cutting her a key to MY building for in case she loses her access fob. And, he loans her the district-issued phone he has for her own personal use, and denied that he does this, even though I already have the phone print-out with the phone making calls to his school during the day when she’s sitting here, and he’s at his school.

  • The guy that resigned in a huff last month after I suspended him for, among other things: Getting lost on a route he’d driven at least 5 times in the last couple weeks and didn’t even call for help, or directions until we called him when moms missed their kids because they were 25 minutes late. He walked in here this morning asking if he put an application would I consider hiring him again. Nope, good bye.

  • The 11th grader at a high school who got into an argument with the bus driver, and when the driver asked him to sit down so the bus could leave the school, whipped out the little tinkler and peed his way down the center aisle of the bus.

It goes on. You meet the most interesting people arouud here.
:eek::rolleyes:

ETA too late for the window: It was a BB, no real damage except a spiderwebbed window. AND when I was on the phone with our Communications person, who was scripting the statement that would be blasted to all the parents of kids on that bus, she actually made me spell “BB” for her. She thought it was spelled “Bee-Bee”.

Twit.

I’ve been thinking of you. I hang on another board where moms are currently doing the “my little pwecious princess has to walk a quarter mile to the bus stop” rant - and “I can’t meet her to pick her up because the baby is sleeping when she gets home!” It apparently is SIMPLY NOT SAFE for a five year old to walk four or five houses surrounded by a dozen other children in a nice suburb anymore.

Moms from NYC are posting and pointing out that their third graders take NYC subways by themselves to school. Moms from rural Wisconsin are pointing out their kids walk two miles to school in the winter (“we just bundle them up good…my family has lived in this farmhouse for three generations, its always been a two mile walk into town to go to school - if it was good enough for their grandfather and me, they can hoof it, too!”)

Please tell me it’s uphill both ways?

Is the Pakistani kid a girl?

Yes, it’s a girl. Normally I get these calls or e-mails and it’s either a younger child like kindergarten of 1st grade, or it may be older, but then it’s always the parent having a fit, seldom the kid. This one threw me - a seventeen year old girl? Scared of shadows?

Other famous similar requests: The man that said his child cannot walk through the snow because she’ll fall and then he’ll sue me and “own my house”.

Or the mom of the 7th grader who said I had to move the stop TWO DOORS down, because her daughter plays the tube ans sometimes has to carry it home. I did point out that she carries it farther from the band room inside the school to the bus, than she does when she gets off the bus. I did not make the comment that popped to the top of my head, which was “maybe she should have picked the flute?”

I actually had one mom ask me to move her kids stop (they were the only two there) FARTHER from home, at least five houses or so. She figured it was just pampering “the little shits” (I swear, her words) to pick them up at home. She wanted them to appreciate that a lot of kids have to do that, and teach them the responsibility of getting up, having some breakfast and being on time, and that under NO circumstances should the driver wait for them if they are not at the stop.

I could have kissed her right smack on the mouth, that one.

I had to walk about 1.5kms to get to school and that is precisely why I chose to play the flute. Hell for a while I even switched to the piccolo.:slight_smile:

Although we’re not talking about daily bus travel, our standard advice now for our overseas tours is that one of the first steps to be taken in such a situation is to collect in all mobile phones. It’s proved effective, in serious incidents in the past (i.e. fatal accidents), in that it allowed the standard protocol to be followed, with local police contacting family etc. (OK, it’s not foolproof, but it’s a helluva lot better than a hundred kids set free on the internet via their phones!)

Okay - I have to admit I’m in awe of the chutzpah required for this act.

Don’t. Just don’t. It’s almost as much of a punch-deserving cliche as ‘is that a machine-gun?’ on sight of a violin case. I find a completely confused and uncomprehending ‘huh?’ works well :slight_smile:

On a serious note, you might find that there’s kids with awkward large instruments who have arranged, either formally with the school or informally with friends, to get help manouevereing things between bus and classroom. A large instrument, by itself, is something a 12-year-old can typically cope with, but they’re also dealing with all the books and everything else they need that day as well. If the weak link in the chain is how the instrument gets from the bus stop to home, then two doors can actually be a real problem.

My older son made $10 a week schlepping a cello for a younger kid on his route. My kid had a violin (put in in his backpack), and would go get the little guy’s cello and a 5 dollar bill twice a week.

Pakistani girls are generally severely overprotected. Yes, that is probably too far for her to walk. According to her parents, anyhoo. :rolleyes:

God love you, Mr Bus Guy, you have a tough job, and you sound like you have a really level head. Don’t take any shit or cave. My spouse taught school for 30+years. You’re right in your observation that it’s always the parents that get worked up over the dilemma of the kid, and the truth of the matter is that the kid doesn’t really care about [whatever the issue is]. Parents are un-fucking-believable sometimes.

I have a crappy retail job for a Big Box Store which will remain nameless. Nevertheless, I will confirm that it is one of many which have store credit cards.

The following story is at least 3rd hand.

Someone walked into the store recently carrying a computer game. No reciept.

“Look, someone stole my identity, got a store credit card in my name, and bought this game with it, and I want you to give me the money for the game”

Um, look, the identity theft angle is doubtful (I failed to ask what, if anything, could be done if that angle had been believed), our store never accepts returns without reciepts, and um, even with a reciept I’m not sure that the person would have gotten cash in return. . . .

If some stranger stole your identity and bought the game online, how the heck did you get your hands on the game?

This question was not resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, and the person trying to return the game became exceedingly vile and profane, before finally being asked to leave, at which point, the manager on duty told the tale to the nearest person who would listen, who regaled a bunch of us in the break room later with this tale, which I now share with you.

Reminds me a lot of www.notalwaysright.com which I use to provide hours of entertainment while I’m at work (I’m an English teacher in Japan)

but yea, Mr Bus Guy’s stuff reminds me a lot about the AP History class at my old High School. Most people loved the class, but it was HARD, so there was, indeed, a bit of cheating that went on every year. Most of the people who cheated, myself included, were intelligent enough to simply copy word for word what other people wrote on their homework assignments (me and my buddy would basically split the homework, I’d do my half, he’d do his half, we’d switch and rewrite EVERY WORD. Took awhile, but not as long as the actual homework).

Anyway, year after us the whole class got busted for cheating cause the teacher, being an intelligent human being who wasn’t blind as a bat, noticed about 20 homework assignments that were all exactly the same. So he gave them all F’s for that assignment. One of the kids was a rather well-off individual, we’ll say he’s a rich piece of shit for arguements’ sake and his parents weren’t happy with this F, so they complained to the school board. Due to the parents’ financial clout, the school board turned to the teacher and told him to revise the grade. He told them fuck right off. They said he had to change the grade and he couldn’t make the class as hard next year. He told them to fuck off again and that, since they wanted him to change a class he’d taught for like 10 years, there wouldn’t be a class next year at all cause he wasn’t going to bow to some stupid rich kid.

So yea, stupid rich kid’s parents ruined the class for everyone else and still got his dumb ass an F, plus the kid was, from what my younger friends told me, ridiculed every day for being a douche and fucking up so terribly.