Suing the shuttle (well, sort of)
I hate riding the shuttle bus. On weekdays, I take the shuttle bus since it is the easiest - but not the most convenient - way for me to reach office. Due to many occurences, I felt hard to contain the urge of swearing inside the bus. That’s no small feat, since most of my close friends know I rarely, if ever, swear.
It had gotten worse these days. Whereas I used to be annoyed some people - their loud chattering/snoring, their katol-scented perfume, and their stealing my space therefore squeezing me by the window - right now it’s the driver and the bus that grates on my nerves. On many occasions, the bus I took up doesn’t have seatbelts- so much for the nagging-nanny attitude about safety, eh? Then the seats are broken in ways that you cannot either recline or return to normal position. The seats don’t have ample room for the feet, such that many times the seat in my front touches - very uncomfortably - at my knees.
Then there’s the radio. Let’s face it - people taking the shuttle are sleepy or exhausted. In the morning, most of us would prefer to sleep than go crazy over their favorite Hale music. In the afternoon, most of us would also rather sleep than dance in the tune of Chocolate (which is a really, really awful novelty song). Yet the bus driver still plays that radio station with the awful "memorize-oriented" jingle, and with the DJ so unfunny s/he had to laugh at his/her own "jokes". If the bus driver wants to stay awake, why won’t he just use the walkman instead? Walkman can be bought at Recto/Divisoria for less than P50. At other times the driver decides, for the lack of better judgment, to play DVD’s which made me witness the Corelli Mandolin movie, which i didn’t like. I mean, seriously, who takes the bus to watch movie? I have never met a person saying "I want to take a bus instead of jeepney because I can watch movies in the bus!" or "I should catch up on this bus to watch the James Bond theyre playing!" I don’t think the driver needs the movies either - he certainly can’t watch while he’s driving, can he? At other times the driver uses the TV broadcast. The problem here is that the signal isn’t very good, and that it flickers uncontrollably. As if motion doesn’t make a person dizzy enough. As though there’s not a possibility that someone inside the bus has epileptic seizures.
I stated this because it’s way different in the airplane, which, incidentally, a manufacturer calls the Airbus. Sure, they have the TV screen, but the sound is off that, by using the headsets, only the person who’s interested will know what’s going on. It also applies for people wanting to hear music. And whenever there are noisy people, you can always request the stewardess to tell them to shut the hell up. We should put into consideration that at times, only during public transportation can a person rest. Comfort and relaxation is an important aspect for public transportation - it may lose costumers due to lack of these two: notice how many middle-classed people prefer to take the FX than the jeep. More importantly, this is a company shuttle we’re talking about: where all people inside it should be mature enough to respect other’s privacy as well as personal space; that when a person wants to entertain himself he should not do it at the expense of others - an example being playing the radio too loudly that people can’t sleep. If only the driver can think like this: that people would prefer silence at times, we would all be sleeping more soundly while riding the shuttle. Wait, now I’m panicking: that would mean that people would be snoring!
As an aside, this is just my first real post, yet I have already broken the two-paragraph rule. Oh well…
