Just a Quiet Saturday

The road works in Newton Abbot wouldn't be so bad except the person who put the temporary traffic lights up had been to the 'Total Chaos School for Temporary Traffic Tight Erectors'. They are three way lights and behind where I am standing are an other set of lights. Traffic comes out from Sherborne Rd and fills three quarters of the space, then the lights change and more traffic comes out of Queen Street and fills the rest of the space and gets stopped right where the bus is, the narrow bit. Then we get a green light but there is an 85A sat there and we can't go any where when we finally get a green light. Then the lights behind us change and the traffic starts to move. By this time we have a red light and guess what? CHAOS.

Later on in the day a woman gets on in Paignton and shows me a Rover Rover ticket for her dog. 75 pence and the dog can make as many bus trips as it likes all day long, save going walkies, a bargain. She doesn't bother showing me her ticket and I have to ask a couple of times. Now because of the above item I am running late and as every bus driver will tell you, when you are running late every second you lose like this sends the stress level up a couple of points on the Ricter scale. Down the road we go and I pick a young man up who is playing his radio. I politely ask him to turn his radio off, I don't want to listen to his music and I am sure no one else on the bus does either. (If you wish to listen to music on a bus get a pair of well padded earphones and every one will love you). The young man turns his radio off. A few stops down the line the lady with the dog gets off but pauses with one foot on the platform and tells me how wonderful I was for, and I quote, "Telling that young man off." I didn't, I merely asked him, politely to switch his radio off which he did. I try to point this little but important fact out to the lady but she was having none of this and was now trying to explain her pet hates, people having a conversation at the top of there voice on a mobile phone. She was telling me this, you've guess it, at the top of her voice. Remember I, and everyone on the bus is running late and getting later. We don't wish to know her pet hats. Really we don't. Stress level going up. Oh yes; and the punch line. She is the mother, and therefore should know better, of one of our bus drivers.