Chinatown bus drama

Rode my favorite form of transportation the other day, the Chinatown Bus. I took it to D.C. and back, and was happy to see that D.C. lines are now more frequent than they were in the early oughts, when the C-town buses first started becoming legit (and I use the term “legit” loosely).

Of course, no C-town bus ride can be complete without its fair share of random events or drama. There is usually always someone demanding to be let on a full bus because they somehow feel they are owed a seat, just because they bought a ticket. This trip some woman was yelling at the driver, telling him to move out of the way, because by the beard of Zeus she was getting on the bus. A friend of mine even told me that once a lady stood in front of the bus until they agreed to take her, or until she stood down. Not sure if she ever made it on the bus, but the moral of the story, people, is that YOU ARE ONLY PAYING 20 BUCKS FOR A FREAKING TICKET. A TICKET THAT YOU CAN REUSE LATER. These bus lines barely operate legally—you think they care less if you report them to the Better Business Bureau? I don’t think so. In fact the bad service, the fight for customers by hawk-eyed saleswomen who can eye a “too-cheap-ass-to-even-ride-on-Greyhound” denizen from a block away, and the whole “will I get a seat?” uncertainty, is part of the adventure of riding the C-town buses. If you want something with a little less “character,” then go pay six times more for a ticket on Amtrak. Yeah, I didn’t think so, ya cheap bastard.

I ask, on Greyhound would you get up to ask the driver how much longer, or demand he pull over to a bathroom, or ask to be let off at some random exit? Yes, all these things have happened while I’ve ridden the bus. I usually want to tell these complainants to save their breath, but in most cases the drivers (who usually can barely speak English) have to give in. All the complainants do, however, is delay the trip for those of us who are just happy to have gotten a seat that isn’t by the stankerific bathroom. In some cases it seems to me the non-Asian riders feel they can bully the drivers because they can’t speak the best English.

In fact, I have mixed feelings about the “gentrification” of the C-town buses. I mostly think it’s been a good thing. On the one hand, to attract the non-immigrant clientele (mostly starving college students and the few brave white-collar workers willing to trade comfort for price), it seems bus lines have instituted a lot of “upgrades”: more frequent service, online ticketing, movies shown in English. On the other hand, I have to suffer a lot more annoying, uppity complaining—plus I was subjected to the Phil Collins blasting from the headphones of the man sitting next to me.

Anyway, I love regaling people with my and my friends’ C-town bus stories. Mine aren’t even as interesting as my friends'; the worst that happened to me was that one of the buses I took back from Boston was having “brake issues.” Luckily it was before we took off, and we were transferred to a different bus. And once, after the rest stop most buses take halfway through, the driver got a call when we arrived in D.C. that he had left a woman behind. But here’s what some of my friends have gone through:

A friend of mine saw a man, she thinks an angry passenger, pull a knife on another man by the C-town bus. She also once rode an airport-shuttle-like van to Boston, and it had very bad shocks.

Another friend riding it to D.C. sat near a man who was eating a whole bag full of crabs. He had to suffer the stench and the loud crab-eating noises.

I’ve heard several stories of C-town buses breaking down on the side of the road.

Some have called the C-town buses “the chicken bus” because they are barely better than the stereotypical rural buses you think of in third-world countries on which people are carrying livestock. I always thought this was rude and somewhat smacked of racism. Except that my coworkers’ friend actually claimed to have sat next to a chicken in a cage on the bus. I don’t know if this is just urban legend, but it really happened, to a friend of a friend….

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RCNY Sighting: Maybe I just thought of this guy because I was thinking about Chinatown buses, but twice this summer while walking back home from the subway I’ve seen a tall black man wearing those big Asian straw hats, the ones that you think of when you envision the stereotypical image of an Asian person working in a rice paddy. I’m not sure whether to be offended or flattered. Is he trying to honor another culture by wearing traditional garb? Or is a he a waiter or host at some Asian fusion restaurant that tries to instill some kind of authenticity by making their staff wear “traditional” garb (you know, like how the Penang waiters wear sarongs)? Or is he just crazy? I guess I’ll never know…

There’s no business like the news business

Can I just say how ridiculous consumer reporting has gotten? I used to love hidden-camera exposes that news stations do, in which they try to catch The Man pulling the wool over the poor consumers’ eyes. It always ends the same way, with the ambush of some no-good retail-giant executive or business owner who has stiffed some poor schmuck who didn’t know he was buying contaminated meat or hiring an unlicensed contractor. The news report would always end with The Man angrily swatting at the camera or running off to hide from the persistent journalist.

I suppose that model hasn’t changed much, but the ridiculousness factor has increased tenfold. A few weeks back I watched Penny Crone on Fox 5 report about some new three-hour diet, and the professionalism was akin to Joan Rivers on the red carpet. She’s double-fisting fast food as she spews forth the deets on a new fad diet (essentially, eat whatever you want in small portions every three hours to keep your body from burning lean muscle instead of fat) while wearing something that decidedly was not your standard broadcast attire (floral shirt, I think) and sporting deep-purple fingernail polish. Her sign off was a brisk powerwalk off camera as she proclaims, “I’m Penny Crone, and I’m running to get a burger,” as the cameraman trails behind. (You only see the back of her head). Wtf? I mean, I know it’s Fox and everything, but I still thought it was pretty ridick.

There was a report I was watching once by another Fox consumer reporter, Mary Garofalo, who was doing the typical chasing-after-the-consumer-swindler-who-is-shielding-her-face-and-running-off-in-shame bit. But instead of saying, “Ms. Swindler, don’t you want to tell your part of the story? Are you going to offer a refund?” Mary starts screaming at the woman, “Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Since when did it become okay for journalists to curse on television, even if it is just the B-word? Wasn’t there a local reporter who got fired for cursing on camera when he thought he was off-air? And a while back I remember seeing another “consumer” report once (wait a minute, I see a pattern here—I think it was also on Fox), to “expose” a fortune teller who would do the egg cracking bit, where you break an egg into a bowl and the yolk comes out all black, which means that someone wants you dead or has put a curse on you or something. In real life, the fortune teller has palmed some bloody animal part into the egg bowl. Ace Reporter was “exposing” this woman for some lady who kept getting swindled out of money to have anti-curse spells performed. Anyone who thinks that fortune-teller clients are helpless, innocent consumers who need help from getting swindled must have run out of real consumer complaints to address. Isn’t there someone getting screwed over by a Times Square electronics dealer somewhere? C’mon, even Arnold Diaz, of CBS 2’s “Shame, Shame, ShAAAAmmmeeee……SHAME ON YOU!” finger-wagging fame wouldn’t stoop that low.

Even non-consumer reporters are getting in on the act. I can’t stand how whenever John Montone reports on a story about someone getting murdered, he always concludes with, “the slimebag got away,” or “the sicko is still on the loose.” No one is saying these men aren’t slimebags or sickos, but c’mon 1010 WINS, you only have 20 minutes to give us the world, so let’s keep the little extra commentary to yourself.

Now with the death of Peter Jennings (Rest In Peace, Mr. Jennings), I’m afraid that even more real newsmen and women are becoming a thing of the past. Boohoo. I really hope up-and-coming journalists model themselves after those guys and not the sensationalists of today. I really don’t think the world needs any more reporters who seem more fitting for A Current Affair than World News Tonight.

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Random Crazy New Yorker (RCNY) sighting: Well, I don’t know if this counts as a New York sighting as I was actually on Long Island when I saw this RCNY, but I went to Long Beach, and there was a rather large woman sunning topless on a decidedly non-topless beach. There were little kids running around everywhere, but she seemed happy to free her willies. When I first saw her, I thought she must be just a very large man with very large man-boobs, since we weren’t on a topless beach. But later when she sat up, I saw that she was definitely a woman. My friend informed me that the indecent exposure laws were changed after that whole controversy over the double standard that lets men go topless, but not women. But after that whole Central Park protest of breast-baring women supporting the woman who was arrested in New York for sunbathing topless, I now realize that Ms. Nude-on-a-Non-Nude-Beach was in fact breaking the law. Even if you were allowed to do it, however, doesn’t mean you should. I just got the shivers. Please God erase the image burned in my mind.