Day 2303: Bus Bag Bastards

A typical Stockholm commute would not be complete without a fellow passenger taking up an extra seat on the bus or train with their bag, leg or other general item/body part. Another favourite strategy, unfortunately not captured in my picture but happening accross the aisle, is to sit in the aisle seat so that the window seat is left free.

I'm long finished complaining about people who take up two seats - I'm from London. I did not arrive late to the selfish passenger party, I was born in it. I'm from that hardy race of commuters who sees a bag or overextended limb as an invitiation to confrontation. No wait, that's wrong. Most Londoners won't even confront you about moving an offending item any more, they'll just sit on it.

Which is why I am not frustrated that the woman in the picture above has her bag on the seat. Instead I want to know where the COJONES, the BALLS, the GRIT, the INTREPIDITY of the many standing passengers is to be found?! I know they wanted to sit, they were giving "the look" to the woman and her bag. Looks 👏 won't 👏 get 👏 you 👏 a 👏 seat.

Judging by her accent, the bag lady was NOT Swedish. For all I know she was from London, just like me. She was capitalising on the native aversion to just fucking TAKING the seat which is PAID for. Swedes - we foreigners are PLAYING you in your own system. Do not be afraid to sit on a bag, loudly state that you are going to park your rumpa, or stride awkwardly and determindly over some knees to get the window seat. I know from sharing other public spaces with you that y'all are masters of the barge and the invasion of personal space, so why do these skills MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR on the bus? Seats are there, GET SOME.

And while we are at it, GÅ LÄNGRE FRAM I BUSSEN FÖR FAN.

Day 1014: All you need is a dead parrot and you've got yourself a sketch

I've written before about catastrophic fuck-ups made by the local transport services in Sweden and even though I risk turning my blog into an unending rant about how piss poor communication is for passengers in the event of a service problem I feel like I have to share what happened today on a seemingly innocent replacement bus.

Now, it might not be as stupid as last week when my bus driver terminated early and ordered everyone onto the bus in front, which had done the same thing with its own passengers, before two completely empty busses drove off leaving a hundred or so very baffled commuters behind, but it probably could serve as a Monty Python sketch (or at the very least, a Benny Hill circular chase.)

Essentially what happened is that a vital tube line had a "power outage" (could be a code word, who knows) for a large portion of the route. When I went downstairs into the bus station as directed I could feel that there were a lot of very angry people wanting to get somewhere in a hurry. I don't really know where I got this mysterious feeling, but it may have had something to do with the two couples having a massive shouting match in the middle of a bus door about whose buggy got on first and is entitled to space. Or the crowd of people jostling to get on another replacement bus. Or the number of people shouting and swearing and cursing and yelling....bear in mind this was on a pleasant, sunny day in the middle of the afternoon and not in a blustery, miserable rush hour (if it had been, I would probably now be dead, judging by the patience levels of the people present).

I decided not to take the shouting-buggy-crazy-parents bus to the local train station, and opted for what I thought would be the safer choice, a rail replacement bus.

Oh how wrong I was!

First and foremost, I should have noticed that the bus driver had no idea what he was doing when he couldn't figure out how to close the doors. By the time he actually managed that, at least 20 additional overenthusiastic people had crammed themselves onto the bus. Some passengers were so angry about this that they began heckling, shouting and swearing at anyone who even looked like they might consider, maybe, turning their head towards the open doors. It was around about this time that I noticed there were two slightly, shall we say, unhinged people centred in the bus who wanted to complain, loudly, about things and get some feedback. Having worked in a library I have a wealth of experience with these kinds of people who, having nothing else to occupy them at around midday on work days, thrive in spaces with seating, warmth and plenty of people with nothing better to do that sit and listen and/or respond to them. Unfortunately, most other people don't have this wealth of experience and are like cannon fodder.

The part that these unhinged people enjoyed the most about the journey was when the driver took off in completely the wrong direction, heading north instead of south for 5 minutes along a road which only ended when you got to the roundabout to come back again. The driver, sensing that this was perhaps not the best thing to do with a bus full of very angry, very crowded nut-nuts, decided to tell everyone via intercom he had driven in the wrong direction because he was feeling stressed. This triggered a near riot and a scrum of know-it-alls shouting different suggestions for the best way to drive. Because, naturally, when you're stressed and driving a large vehicle, what you need is 30 different suggestions for the best route.

After what might have been the longest 20 minutes of my life covering ground that the usual train covers in 2 and standing in the middle of a crowd of people screaming either directions, complaints or "leave him alone he's stressed" we eventually arrived at the next tube stop. A good number of people chose this point to abandon ship, and I was relieved to see that the craziest were among them. But my relief was short lived since they were replaced by equally as crazy people. One man began punching the doors when the driver didn't follow his advice about what route to take. Although I was rather inclined to join him, since the route he had in fact taken was one that went twice around Raspberry Mountain, yes that really is a real place, rather clearly demonstrating that he had no fucking idea where he was. His response to the door-punching man's cries of "where are you going? why are you going here again!?" was to point one of the members of the scrum and say "he told me to go this way".

Eventually door-puncher was released from his bus-prison (which had many windows that were locked shut for some unfathomable reason) and the crowded bus calmed down a little bit. Just in time for a parade of old people with zimmerframes to come and try to find some space on the bus. Cue a host of aggressive and very warm (no windows, remember) passengers finding any excuse whatsoever to yell "help him! help her! stand up! move!" under a thinly veiled guise of helpfulness. At the next stop, I reached my tolerance limit for all the crazy, old, unhinged, hot, know-it-all or overly-helpful fellow passengers and managed to get a skeleton service train. At this point I had very much decided that the whole situation was almost a textbook definition of ridiculous and deserved a blog post. Unfortunately there was no way to take pictures of the events for the blog, so just imagine a bus full of angry people instead. I'll leave you with an image of Raspberry Mountain.

*Not the same Raspberry Mountain