Mental Floss

Note: The following is a bit of a venting exercise for me while attempting to write a real complain to Greyhound about my hellacious trip South. It was easier if I wrote what I REALLY wanted to say, then made a somewhat professional-sounding letter later. The following is the…shall we say “raw” footage? This is posted for sheer amusement value and not actually being sent to Greyhound.

To: Greyhound Cattle Carting Lines, Inc. Dallas, Texas
Attn: Who am I kidding? This is going to wind up as someone in your office’s toilet paper!
From: Someone Who Was Stupid Enough To Pay You for a Trip to Tennessee

To Whom It May Concern: (Though I doubt any of you are actually going to read this, much less be concerned.)

I am ripping you a new asshole writing you this letter because I am both simultaneously appalled and amazed by your gross stupidity incompetence in handling the volume of holiday travelers this year. (And also somehow reminded of a previous Greyhound trip where the bus blew a tire in Bristol and we were stranded for several hours while someone brought a new one. Ever hear of a SPARE? I see that you now have spares in your buses…did someone hit you with the clue bat finally?)

To say you are idiots would be an insult to idiots everywhere. You are notorious for overselling your routes, and given your handling of all of the Southbound passengers at Port Authority, signs indicated you knew you had a rather large demand on your hands. Why else would you simply line everyone heading south up and count them off by the busload onto a fleet of waiting and constantly arriving empty buses? By my reckoning, you had to have had at least 10 buses heading to Richmond without passengers discharging along the way. 10 full buses times 50+ people = at least 500 descending on Richmond from NY simultaneously. That doesn’t include anyone from any other points of origin, nor does it include anyone who has arrived earlier and not been able to be crammed into an outbound bus. BASIC MATH SKILLS. BASIC LAWS OF PHYSICS. What goes in, must come out. If you knew enough to run that many buses into Richmond, COMMON SENSE would’ve told you to have enough buses coming out of Richmond as well, plus allowing enough staff and crowd control to maintain some semblance of order.

Obviously, you folks were absent the day the Common Sense Fairy came around. By my reckoning, there appeared to be no less than 1,500 people and possibly double that crammed into that building. There was no semblance of order to the chaos whatsoever, lines stretched from one end of the building to the other, and Greyhound staff was nowhere to be found. Somehow I don’t think the Fire Department would be too happy to see that kind of crowd in that building for starters, and haven’t you people ever heard of crowd control? For starters, nobody knew what the hell line they were standing in. There were no barriers, no staff members to handle the confusion, only a gaggle of confused and thoroughly pissed off passengers. Somehow, what was described as a 1:05 layover on my ticket turned into 3+ hours of discomfort and chaos. Once we managed to find our respective lines, we began the tedious process of figuring out where the hell the END of the line was and staking out our spots to rot on the hard floor for THREE hours. Then the fun began.

Some cavalier individuals took it upon themselves to attempt to make their way to the front of the line, despite the fact that most of us had been there for hours already. People started screaming, yelling, and getting ugly for lack of a better word. Several of us were threatened by these line jumpers. Somehow I seemed a pushover to some vertically challenged little douche bag bitch. Granted, I clearly had about a foot and a hundred pounds or more on this little bigmouth, but she saw fit to get up into my face, or as close to it as she could come, and threaten physical violence against me. As much as I would’ve loved to snap her in half or toss her in a pot like the little shrimp that she was, I wasn’t about to get involved in something in a city where I didn’t go to school with half of the police force or have a valid PBA card. I laughed in her face at the time, yet this severely bothered me. I am a diagnosed bi-polar who is prone enough to paranoid features and panic attacks, and did not need any sort of emotional mindfuck from trying to go visit my mother for Christmas.

And where was security or the police during all of this? They were clearly more concerned with investigating the contents of their colons, seeing as they disappeared the general vicinity the bathrooms, never to return.

Needless to say, you win the award for Piss Poor Prior Planning. You have thoroughly pissed me off to the point I refused to use my return trip ticket and suffer the same fate. I far preferred to waste even more money to rent a car and drive myself back than to suffer the paranoia and emotional trauma from that debacle again. By all that’s holy, we should all be suing your asses for gross negligence. And you’d best be offering me a refund on the unused portion of my ticket at the very least, otherwise you will be hearing from an attorney to the tune of the cost of the entire ticket, the cost of the rental car plus gas and tolls, legal fees, and damages for the shrink bills it’s going to take to forget that experience.

The words “You Suck” don’t even BEGIN to cover the contempt I feel for you assholes right now. I think I’ll hand my dollars to Amtrak next time I need to travel.

Thanks for fucking me up even more. Even the airlines have more common sense than you folks.