Hit me on the bus

Two things about public transit. One: I hate my bus/Metro pass. Or more precisely, I hate the scanning boxes on buses. They don't work. Yesterday I took the bus 4 times, and my pass worked twice.

At least the drivers are cool about it. There are so many defective passes (or boxes) that most drivers just wave me through if the pass won't scan. It always scans on the Metro, but on the bus? Forget it.

Again this morning, the thing wouldn't scan. Each driver has his or her own method for getting the pass to scan. This morning's driver bent the card slightly and whipped the part with the chip in it over the machine and voila. After me, person after person got on and nobody had a problem, even people whose cards are inside their wallets. They just plopped their whole wallet on the box and it scanned. But mine? No. It needs a little bend and whoosh over the box. I'm sick of it.

Two: There's a guy who takes the bus in the morning who plays his music on his headphones way too loud. He's not a teenager. He's a paunchy, 40-something guy, maybe Latin American or Philippino, and he blasts his heavy metal so you can hear it 5 or 6 seats away from him.

So this morning, Ms. Bossy Boots, another bus character is on the bus. She is a 40-something engineer who always wheels her computer around on a luggage thing, and often asks people if they will switch places with her so she can be in a seat that accommodates her luggage. She is a freakin' pain in the ass.

So Ms Bossy Boots sits two seats away from Senor Heavy Metal, and immediately leans overs and asks him to turn his music down because she can hear it. Of course, he can't hear her, so he takes his ear buds out and she repeats, she asks (for a change) doesn't order him, to turn his music down. He says he'll play it as loud as he wants, and puts his ear buds back in. So she HITS him. She smacks him on the arm. And he ignores her. He wins!

The best part of this is that there was another woman seated between the two of them. There was no way she was getting involved in this, so she just sat there with a really amused look on her face. And we all listened to second-hand heavy metal all the way downtown.

Fin.