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Bus Ride Snooker & Bob, Bob, The Trainer Man

Blog: Frustrated Businessman
Posted by: knightrider45 Thursday 8th May 2008, 8:33am
Last edited 08/05/2008 8:33am by knightrider45

This post is not politically correct, but I have to share a couple of conversations I’ve had with friends through a long night shift, fighting both to stay awake as well as the effects of the (rapidly worsening) flu.

Firstly, the Bus Ride Snooker. I'll share my other conversation in a day or so, as both on the same blog would make it a really long one. My friend Graham, a lorry driver, used to be a bus driver years ago when the buses just started to change to the One Man Operated systems we see today.

One game the drivers and conductors used to play sometimes when they were bored was snooker. And they used to play it like this:

The overall objective was to get an unsuspecting passenger to sit in a nominated seat, by the driver using a combination of acceleration, clutch and steering, moving the bus in such a way that the innocent passenger takes his place in the nominated hot seat.

The skilled bus driver could get any passenger to sit wherever he wanted using this technique. The favourite one concerned middle aged passengers, loaded up with shopping bags. As the passenger boarded the bus and began walking down the aisle in between the seats, the bus driver could make that passenger walk fast, slow, forwards, backwards, or even get them to walk the entire length of the bus with a very strange gait, simply by controlling the buses movements.

If the driver had taken a particular dislike to a passenger, the passenger in question could be made to walk forwards, backwards, and forwards again, no end of times, before they actually got to sit down. And the effects were even more spectacular if the passenger was loaded down with lots of bags!

Pot Black involved the conductor standing next to a nominated seat, and the driver had to get the passenger to sit in it, just by using the buses movements. Bonuses would be awarded to the driver who had managed to pot the black by making the passenger sit in a particular seat, but who then promptly then got back up after sitting down in it to move to another seat, as this proved without a doubt that the passenger had only sat down as a result of the bus driver's skill and they hadn't actually intended to sit where they'd ended up.

And on really busy routes with lots of stops and passengers getting on and off, the game could be upgraded to billiards, depending on the skills of the bus driver, by using the buses movements to get passengers to bump into each other, thereby potting two shots in one by making both passengers sit down on different seats on each side of the bus.

But perhaps one of the most disturbing scenes in my minds eye is that of the on bus ballet sessions. As Graham worked in Yorkshire, a fair few of the passengers were miners.

Big, butch hairy men. But, Graham tells me, there was a particular bus driver who specialised in getting these men's men to do a wonderfully wicked gait along the bus, before making them sit down immediately after, and not until, they'd displayed their wonderfully skillful ballet movements along the seating aisle, ending with a quick, smart pirolette (sp?) as they began to sit down. I'm told that this effect was particularly successful if the passenger was loaded with various bags.

Just wouldn't happen today would it? Mainly because the suspension on today's buses is much improved over the old Bristol VR buses that had virtually no suspension. But, as well as that, today's PC (silly) climate would ensure it could never happen.

Well, the vision made my night go just a little bit quicker anyway!! And if only the passengers knew!!

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