Rant- Top 6 most annoying people on the bus

Top 6

Most annoying people on the bus

So, I commute to work via two buses. I’m a typical bus commuter; I have a novel in my bag,  humble biscuits to munch on in case I get stuck for hours in a traffic jam (which is what happens every Friday afternoon more or less), I have my simple, quiet little MP3 and I read the Metro newspaper.

My favourite part of the Metro is when everyone writes in complaining about something or another (it’s what made Britain great, our penchant for bitching) but recently I’ve noticed that everyone has been writing in whining about things that annoy them on public transport. So far I’ve seen folks whinge about others wearing sandals, or dirty clothing, or putting on make-up.

 None of these things bother me.

But it got me thinking about what does make my blood boil because, in general, I am a deeply (almost disturbingly,) angry person. I could write a dissertation on my pet hates. 

So I thought I would get into my typical Rage Mode (it’s pretty much my Stand-by) and delve into the top six most annoying people you can find on busses.

6. Head phone blasters.

So, as stated I use my mp3 on the bus. But you know what? I have the common curtsey to 

check my music isn’t pouring out of headphones in an annoying stream of music that can’t quite be made out but is always there. 

It’s frustrating, when you are sitting there, say trying to read, but all you can hear is some god-awful tripe pulsing in the background, tormenting you with its eternal teasing.  It’s even worse when there’s more than one twat blasting out his or hers tunes, forcing the rest of us to listen to a medley of noise, like a confused sitcom playing too many different background themes at the same time.

There was one time when some guy was sprawled out at the back of the bus, like some sort of degenerate pimp-daddy wannabe octopus, listening to Eminem crying about his mom or sad life or girlfriend or whatever. This, this was annoying enough, but then the guy began to rap along with Eminem.

He began to rap along badly, getting all the words wrong and going out of sync with that tinny little noise screeching out of his headphones.

I swear to god I wanted to murder someone. Well, namely him. But being of sound mind and body I didn’t (being a short and feeble, he’d probably have battered me), I just sat and seethed like a stereotypical repressed Brit.

I know that not everyone wants to hear my music; not everyone likes heavy rock or cheesy pop from the nineties.

I implore all headphone users out there, for the love of your fellow man, please, just check they aren’t too loud!

That being said, I find Head-phone blasters relatively innocent. The others on my list don’t get as much understanding and kindness from me.

5. Human Loud-Speakers.

These (and the people in number 4) are the types that go on shit like Big Brother. You know, the kind of rude, arrogant fucks that describe themselves as ‘bubbly’ and ‘I’m just honest me, and if people don’t like it, they can deal with it.’ The kind of people that think they are so much more interesting than they actually are. I don’t mind if someone wants to have a dull as mid-election politics conversation, but please, for the love of Christ, stop 

inflicting it on others.

For example, anyone finding this blog boring, can go away and read something more amusing.

Or, if I decide to talk about my love of Anglo-Saxon literature, I do so quietly with those who share my interest.

I don’t scream on the bus, at the top of my freaking lungs about how ‘Sally from IT is a bitch because she used my cup’ or that ‘Joe is, like, so fit, and, like, I totally would fuck him, but you know, not in a slutty way.’

Honest to god I want to weep sometimes when I see a crowd of teens get on the bus; not because I’ve read The Sun too often and believe they will stab me in a  savage attack to get 20p from my pocket, but because teens are the worst offenders of being loud-with-nothing-good-to-say talkers.

The time that I get on the bus means that, after an hour, school kids begin to get on as well. I then get assaulted for 40 mins to an hour of this brainless dribble pouring from their mouths, which wouldn’t be so bad, if so many teens weren’t so unrelentingly spiteful and stupid.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with teenagers in general. I even like teens on the whole. But, teens, like adults and children, have a fair share of utter pricks in their age-group, and it’s always the pricks that have insults and stories of petty fights and arguments ripping out of their mouths, complete with audacious, obnoxious laughter that rings down the god-damn streets.

I remember a time, not long ago, when a mixed group of six/seven teens came on the bus and they began to scream and yell about how some ‘bitch’ in their school looked like a tramp, and how they wanted to beat her up. They all laughed like a pack of rabid hyena’s but then one of their friends turned around and said ‘what are you all getting on so loud for? Shut up man, it’s embarrassing.’ And the assault against my ears ended. Good teen who shut up his fellow school mates, I thank you.

I just pity the poor girl they felt they needed to humiliate and harass, even when she wasn’t around to defend herself.

Just a few days ago there were three people, two guys and a woman, sitting on the bus talking so, so, so loudly. They were all in their late forties, early fifties and they all looked like they were pretty wasted.

It was four-thirty in the afternoon.

They kept telling all these dirty jokes really loudly, and the woman was there, cackling like a medieval witch and insisting that they could say these things around her even though she was one of the fairer sex.

It was...

God, it was just embarrassing. Like a Carry-On film but without the, ugh, class and glamour (oh god, never thought I’d write that sentence.)

So then these young girls get on, around thirteen years old, and they give the triad of old, pathetic drunks such a scathing look that I almost felt bad for them.

Quick FYI to all the Human Loud Speakers, your conversations does not make you cool. Your jokes are not funny. The fact that you are drunk does not impress me. I do not care about what happened in your day. You threatening others who are not around doesn’t make 

you seem tough.

Yelling on the bus makes you seem like an ill-mannered yob desperate for the attention of others.

And then leads us on to...

4. Attention-seeking teens.

Again, I got nothing against teens in general. They are the future of the planet! However, I find that only teens do dumb shit like swinging on the bus ceiling handles like a pubescent Tarzen, or roll up newspaper to fling at people, or talk about strangers on the bus really loudly, or touch other people. 

There was a teen girl the other day who kept touching some guy’s hair in front of her, making her and her dumbass buddy snigger for the entire journey. I would love to say this guy had some crazy-ass hair that warranted such attention, but he didn’t, he just had sandy hair cropped into a normal style.

Seriously, do these girls not know that buses are where the freaks go and live?

FYI guys, don’t touch random strangers. In fact don’t interact at all!

We don’t like you, we don’t find your antics fun tom-foolery. If you want to act that way, go on a reality TV show. At least then most of us can just turn you off and pretend that you don’t exist.

3. Drunk wee-stink man.

Does this even need explanation? I think anyone who’s ever used any kind of public transport knows this character. The drunk guy that reeks, REEKS of piss and cheap alcohol. Clutching to his Frosty Jacks and swaying like an ugly weeble he inexplicably is allowed onto the bus, where he goes on to (at best) fall asleep, leaning over and toppling onto the unfortunate he decided to sit next to or (at worst) wandering the bus yelling incoherent rants and insults.

If you live in a really classy area, you’ll even have your own drunk that everyone knows. Where I lived as a kid we had this guyhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTm1FUYo05E. He was known as the Cotteridge Growler and there are so many freaking stories about this guy that I suspect that in the distant future he’ll be one of the myths adults tell their kids (and later still a myth that academics will read and over-analyse.) So this guy would occasionally get on the bus and scream at harmless people. I used to dread  going home late at night knowing he’d be there roaring (literally) and then rambling angrily to people. In later years (before I moved away and he vanished) he used to just sort of scream at buses as they drove past.

The other one (yes, we had multiple) was this guyhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPpvUNEv2WE,  he was well spoken (relatively speaking) and I remember he held up the bus for ages by having on foot on the bus, one foot off it, and he kept asking the poor non-English speaking bus driver what the time was. It was like the Mad Tea Party with the Hare and Alice and Hatter and Mouse but instead of them I just had a very dirty hat-wearing man, bored commuters, a confused Polish bus driver and no tea or scones.

However, unlike the others I have mentioned, I hold no real animosity to the drunk wee-stink men (and ladies) as I can usually imagine that some terrible shit has gone down in their lives for them to be so royally screwed up now.

So whilst they annoy (and occasionally frighten) me, I do have sympathy in my heart for them.

2. Tinny-shitty music blasters.

People with their headphones on too loud are mildly annoying but they are so much better than the scum-sucking fuckwits who play their shitty, heinous music on their fucking phones on the bus with no headphones.

And you know what else? What makes the Tinny- shitty music blasters even worse?

The fact that it’s always the most crap music ever that they play. It doesn’t even count as music. It’s just some brain-dead moron who would describe himself as being from ‘the streets’ (translation: he grew up in a council house and thinks that makes him ‘gangsta’,) talking in bored monotone to this aimless, simplistic beat like a child banging on a fucking 

pot.

Sweet Jesus it makes me so fucking angry.

I try to ignore it. I’ll put on my own little mp3, but the fuckers playing this tripe have it on so loud that I either have to blast my own headphones, destroying my ear-drums and bothering other passengers just to drown out their ‘bad-man dirge’ or I have to deal with the fact that I can hear two conflicting songs going at the same time.

Ugh! The worst time was when two lads were on the bus, at the back (as always). They were dressed like twelve-year-old chavs but must have been at least in their mid-twenties. 

You know these guys, there the ones that fucked around in school and always wagged lessons and gave the teachers and nice kids shit. They were the ones that had free dinners but everyone in their family smoked, including the children. They were the ones that spent their entire school years never wanting to be in school, and then when they turned sixteen suddenly all they seemed to do was loiter at the school gates waiting for their much younger friends to come out and hang out with them. They live that sad existence of never quite growing up- despite even having a child (or more) of their own- so they never get a job, they think they rock because they smoke weed and they all think they’re going to make it by intoning bad rhymes with a crap beat.

So anyway, these two guys are on the bus, playing that god-awful music, the guy they were playing was going on and on about the police aka 'pigs' and how evil they were for wanting him to stop robbing innocent old grannies. But then, these two very pretty young girls (mid-teens at the oldest) come up stairs and the two guys decide that wooing them is the best option.

Now, the plus side was that the awful music they played was turned off.

The bad side was that they began to ‘spit lyrics’ themselves.

It was painful. I wiped a tear away, a tear wept for them and for humanity at large. Millions of years of evolution and what do we get? Two guys acting too young for their age and attempting to get with underage girls by standing in the bus aisles (getting in everyone’s way), showing off their sweat stained armpits and rapping poorly at the girls with some of the most intolerably bad lines I’ve ever heard. And that’s including the shit they were playing beforehand.

The girls giggled incessantly and politely declined the men (and I use the term ‘men’ lightly), before they left the bus waving goodbye to the girls and lifting up their sagging tracksuit bottoms which was showing off their hairy arse-cracks.

     1. The Weed Smokers

Before I get into this, please know that I don’t dislike people who smoke weed, in their own homes, or amongst friends or anywhere private. You wanna smoke weed? Be my guest, I don’t give a damn. I don’t have any strong opinions on the matter- which is rare because I tend to have strong opinions on just about every mundane thing.  So by Weed Smoker, I literally just mean that prick smoking it on the bus, not just anyone who smokes it.

However, please respect the fact that not everyone smokes weed; please do not smoke it in a public place like on a bus.

Now that the disclaimer is over, I’ll begin:

People who go on the bus to smoke ‘da ‘urb’ are some of the worst people on the fucking planet. 

Seriously. 

I despise anyone smoking that heinous shit on the bus. Itstinks. It stinks like cat-vomit mixed with maggot-riddled cheese.

I‘ve wanted to throw up so many times at six in the morning because some arse-hole decided that it was necessary to come on the bus stinking of that crap and then lighting up a new one for us all to suffer with. 

It smells so bad it gives me a head-ache, I get nauseous and my stomach begins to cramp. I don’t go on the bus with a smelly egg sandwich. I don’t assault people’s noses by coming on unwashed and reeking.

Why, Weed Smokers, why do you smoke on the bus?

Why don’t you smoke at home, away from people?

It’s freaking anti-social smoking weed. It’s anti-social, it’s rude and it’s gross. Why do it in a metal box on wheels that’s taking me, oh-so slowly, to work? Why do it where we’re all tramped with you and your stench?

Do you think it’s cool?

Because I’m gonna let you in on a secret. 

IT’S NOT!!!

It is not cool! You SMELL! Thanks to you, THE WHOLE FUCKING BUS STINKS!!! 

Because of you asshole! Because you just had to do it in front of a ‘no smoking’ sign!

Even worse, EVEN WORSE, is the fact that every time you’re on the bus, you open all the god-damn windows or we, the ordinary folk, have to open the windows, in a bid to dilute the filth you are insisting on putting in to our sharedair. Living in England, it is cold and wet nearly all the time.

So now, thanks to you, I am on the bus, at the wee hours of the  morning (the damned sun isn’t up yet!) freezing cold, with rain and sleet hitting me, feeling nauseous because of you and your filthy habit.

You make me sick Weed Smokers- literally and metaphorically. And that is why you are the very top of the most annoying people on the bus, beating loud-mouth teens, piss-drenched drunks and obnoxious wannabes. It’s why you are the Worst.