TGWTG User Blogs

I haven't ridden on school buses a lot in the past. In fact, the only times I can remember before this year were to go on field trips back in elementary school. However, when you live about 30 miles and about an hour and a half drive (give or take, assuming there's morning traffic, which there always is) and involves crossing a bridge, we figured what's the worth in wasting money on bridge tolls and gas when we could just pitch in a fixed amount to hire a charter bus. So that's what most of us did, and boy was it an interesting, sometimes immensely frustrating year with our school bus.

 Now, I don't mean to sound biased or anything specifically based around my experience with them, but I'm sure most people out there share similar stories as I do. However, buses are a great resource, and especially with people trying to do as much for the environment as they can, it's a great means of transport without having to put so many cars on the road, or worse, deal with snobbish assholes who drive Priuses and, apparently, believe they are higher up than you on the humanity scale because of it. 

My school was different from most public schools (primarily because it was a charter school) in that kids were really allowed to be who they wanted to be without the fear of having their asses kicked on a daily basis. Generally, everyone knew and put up with each other, but that didn't mean everyone hung out with each other. There were still groups of friends who would go off together daily and eat, but that's beyond the point. In the bus, EVERYONE was squeezed together (sometimes in rather tight and compact spaces), so we had to deal with everyone up front. Here's how it sort of went: The majority of the seniors were in the back together, and the quiet "artsy" underclassmen were generally in the front. Then there were those in the middle. The pseudo-anti-conformity, emoish kids. They're the kids who wear band shirts, Converse shoes, and black jackets with duct tape on them (because that's apparently a style, I suppose). The ones who pretty much everything they do and talk about in some way revolves around sex (yet I'm willing to bet the majority of them are to afraid to actually do anything sexual). THOSE kids. Every kid who was in school in the last six to seven years knows them, and has dealt with them before.

Everyday was a civil war between them and my friends (the seniors in the back). Holy Hell were those kids loud. Not only did everything they talked about involve sex, they felt it necessary to scream every sentence at the top of their lungs.  Not even out iPods at the highest volume could drown them out. Listening to a group of them talk, no, scream about sex is not how many of us wanted to spend the better part of two hours riding in traffic to school on a daily basis, so naturally, shout fights between them and the seniors inevitably ensued. To be frank, I'm surprised the bus drivers didn't just drive us off a cliff having to listen to this daily.

This is probably actually why we went through about half a dozen different drivers throughout the year. I'm dead serious. There were drivers we had for a week or two, then we never saw them again. One of the drivers we had actually would yell at those kids and tell them to shut up, but unfortunately, she was gone after about a week and a half. There were some who apparently had tolerance on a godly scale managed to stick with us, and those were the ones who many of us had little respect for. But I must say, I respect them for putting up with us for the greater part of a year, driving us daily to and from school and having to listen to the decibel level of the kids in the middle that could pierce the sides of the metal frame.

Now, one of the problems that I have in all of this is that some of the girls in that loud group of kids I'm actually pretty close friends with (I actually dated one of them at one point). I can't say I enjoy the presence of the guys in that group (they're generally the worst), but I can stand the girls I'm friends with, in fact, I hang out with them voluntarily quite often. I have this nasty habit of making friends with people in two opposing groups, so I'm often split between with who I side with. This has happened to me numerous times in my time at school, hell, it's even happened to me with online friends whom I've never met in person.

But anyways, back to the point. The worst part was that towards the end of the year, they grew tired of sitting in the middle and us constantly reserving the back for the seniors that they actually started migrating to the back. Trust me, we did our best to oust them, but eventually, messages were sent via email that told us to start letting them on the back of the bus. As you can imagine, this led to some problems. I can't even really imagine why they would want to migrate to the back, it was probably the worst place to be if you wanted to have a peaceful ride. The suspension on those pieces of crap was so bad, we felt every single bump and notch in the road, and in some cases, fly from our seats and nearly hit our heads on the roof driving over big enough bumps (not joking).

This is another thing I have against school buses: They're always old and crappily built. I'm sure this is the result of the heads of the bus companies saying, "Why bother giving kids peace of mind that their bus won't break down in the middle of the freeway when we can save money by giving them a second-rate ride?" Corporate America: Reaping in the benefits at the expense of your children's safety! But I digress once more. There were countless times where I was barely able to personally rely on the bus making it up a damn hill, let alone get to school safely. Sometimes, we would crawl up an incline on the freeway at about 30-40 mph because the bus couldn't handle driving up at the regular pace, praising the Lord we were in the far lane so no one rear-ended us. Other times, the bus would just straight up break down on the way to school in the middle of a city street, so we'd need to call on another bus to take us the rest of the way. And sometimes it would break down as it was coming to pick us up at the end of the day, making us wait another damn hour before either it works again or another bus comes to pick us up. This was especially helpful when I had a 10 page essay to finish the following day, and when every moment was precious to me. Timing is everything, as they say.

If the build of the bus wasn't bad enough, the seats were. Like all school buses, the seats were particularly uncomfortable and very aged. There were tears all along the backs of them, graffiti written on them with Sharpie, and holes that were sometimes tacked up with God-knows-what kind of a glue (it was a sort of brown-green-yellow of color and looked like something was oozing from it. Seriously, it was gross). I was one of the lucky ones who could sleep on the bus rather soundly, but for some, getting comfortable was a problem, especially for one of my larger friends, who was so big of a guy he had to take up a whole seat and sit horizontally because his legs could barely fit in the little legroom alloted to us. Worst of all, towards the end of the year, the bus company struck again when they probably decided that one bus was cheaper than two, so we were forced to fit all of the kids from every single stop onto one bus for the last month and a half of school. I'm sure they realized that no bus could fit all of those kids, but apparently, but who cares, it's cheaper! So, several times, we needed to triple up kids into seats, and in the worst case scenarios, kids had to unsafely sit in the aisle. Fuck you, bus company.

Though my own experience with school buses was rather poor, they're a great idea and a great means of transport. Some of us just wish we could have a bit more quality for our money. But oh well, beggars can't be choosers. We'll continue to ride them because it saves us gas, they'll continue to take us were we need to go, and as they say, the wheels on the bus go round and round.

School buses: 5.5/10