This was today’s duty, the first bit is fine, drive a Megabus out of service to Portsmouth and then start the 05:50 Portsmouth to London service, via Southampton. At Winchester hand over to another driver who will take it on to London. Have a break and then the misery starts – nearly 4 hours of Park and Ride which stretches my patience to near breaking point. During the week the Park and Ride customers are 99% regulars who work in Winchester, all wish you Good Morning when boarding and say Good Bye when getting off. Constantly driving in a small circle is boring but the passengers are fine. Then along comes Saturday with a totally different type of customer – they know nothing but think they know it all! The way the Winchester P+R scheme works is that the car park is pay and display, a tear off portion of the display ticket then acts as the car drivers’ bus ticket for a return into town. Passengers from any car are issued a return ticket from the ticket machine on the bus at nil cost. This is where the Saturday users think they know it all, the passengers from a car will rush on while the driver holds up their ‘ticket’. “Hold on”, “Wait a moment”, “Come back, please” I have to keep calling up the bus. They sometimes stop and stare at me from the back of the bus but rarely do they come back to the front. I try and tell the driver that their passengers need tickets and then they tell me they don’t! “It says that the driver and passengers go free on the bus”. I’ve tried explaining that they need tickets, even though it’s free, to prove on the return trip that they are actually car park users and not people trying to get a free ride, but it’s useless. Now I just tell them they need tickets for their passengers and if they wont come and get them, argue that they’re not needed, or just leave them hanging out of the ticket machine that’s their problem. They will have to pay £1.10 each (single adult fare from town to a car park) to get back to the car park!

Saturday also brings the “I wanted that stop” scream! How do I know a passenger wants to get off at the next stop if no one presses the bell, no one stands up or moves? I usually respond by saying “Sorry, I didn’t hear the bell. Did you ring it?”. Like a well worn script the passenger will say “you always stop there” to which I’ll say “I don’t think so, we only stop if the bell is rung or someone at the stop signals that they want to get on”. This was repeated several times today once with the addition of a second passenger chipping in with “How do tourists know where to get off if you don’t stop?”. “Madam, if they’ve got an ounce of sense they say ‘would you please tell me the best stop for the Cathedral, Great Hall,Wolvesly Palace, Law Courts etc”. If they think they’ll be able to guess where to get off that’s up to them, I don’t think stopping without being asked will improve the chance of the guess being any better. None of the ‘sights’ are actually visible from what is the nearest bus stop to them.

I feel better now having got that off my chest :-)