Tag Archives: Overheard

Speaking of funny bus conversations…

Here are some I compiled for my August 9th Real Change column:

Monday evening, northbound 48:

A woman and man in the seats across from me are getting to know each other.

Woman: “Oh, my God, you’re funny.” [short pause] “Take me home with you.”
Man: “No.”
Woman: “You got a wife?”
Man: “No.”
Woman: “Then take me home with you.” [another short pause] “I’ll cut your hair.”

Tuesday evening, westbound 545:

A man and two women, probably coworkers, are making small talk on their commute home from work.

Woman A: “Where did you go to grad school again?”
Woman B: “At University of Oregon.”
Woman A: “Oh. Is that next to California, or am I missing a state?”

Wednesday, midday, westbound 10:

Two women get on at 15th and John, talking music.

Woman A, to Woman B: “I’ve got all kinds of stuff. I’ve got everything from Shania Twain to Kid ‘n Play. Gospel, hip-hop, every genre. The sad thing is, since I’m not going to have kids or anything, when I die, my music collection is just going to go in the trash.”

Thursday afternoon, eastbound 4

A group of teenagers is cutting up in the back. The bus reaches a crowded stop, where another group of teenagers is waiting to get on.

Girl in back: “Lord, my sister’s about to get on this bus.”
Boy in back: “Oh, that one with the backpack?”
Girl: “No, the one with the pajama-bottom-lookin’ pants and corner-store flip flops.”

Saturday, noon, northbound 36:

A man and a woman are sitting in the elevated seats behind me, apparently discussing family business.

Man: “I have to communicate all that stuff through Mom. I can tell her stuff to tell him, but if I say, ‘Hey Jason…,’ that’s breaking the no-contact order.”
Woman: “What no-contact order?”
Man: “For saying I was going to kill him, which I did. I said I was going to blow his f-ing head off for chasing me around the house with a machete.”

Saturday afternoon, southbound 16

A man and woman who are both sitting in the back are making conversation to pass the time.

Woman, to the man: “How did you tattoo yourself? Never mind — I don’t want to know.”

Westbound 27, 5-ish

A man gets on with several bags of groceries and sits in the front section, near two middle-aged women.

Woman A: “That’s quite a load.”
Man: “Yeah, I have to do this every two weeks.”
Woman A: “Shoot, I do it every week.”
Woman B: “I do it every day.”
Man: “You got a big house?”
Woman B: “Nope. I’m a big woman.”

6:40 PM, westbound 545

A cell phone conversation:

“You owe child support? How much you pay?” [pause] “900 a month? For one kid?” [pause] “Damn. That makes me feel a little better. I only pay 600.”

Speaking of young men…

If, before you board the 48, the driver asks, “Are you allowed on the buses again?” and then, seconds after she lets you on, follows with, “You can’t bring gasoline on the bus,” it might be time to brush up on Metro’s code of conduct.

Speaking of football…

OK, so the Seahawks lost yesterday, but we all know the preseason ain’t about winning. For this bus chick, the preseason is all about Seneca Wallace. But I digress.

I can’t believe it’s about to be football season again. It seems like just yesterday that Busnerd and I headed off on our Super Bowl XL adventure, carrying with us the hopes of our fellow Seattleites, including (and especially) a very enthusiastic 2 rider.

January 23rd, 2006

At least one of us never had any doubt

A couple of Saturdays ago, DBH [aka Busnerd] and I headed to Capitol Hill for dinner and a movie. It was the weekend Seattle had a bye and no one in the city was talking football, but the young brother (we’ll call him 12th Man) who got on the bus at 19th and Union had something to celebrate. 12th Man’s hair was parted down the middle and freshly braided, and he was sporting a Shaun Alexander (#37, for those who don’t know) jersey and the requisite baggy jeans (Are those ever going out of style?).

“What about them Seeeeeeeeeeeeeahawks?!” he hollered at the bus driver in that accent peculiar to natives of this city. (Folks from the 2-0-sickness know of what I speak: the high-pitched, whiney tone; the randomly emphasized consonants; the s’s that sound like sh. In this accent, Seattle sounds like She-at-o.) The bus driver ignored the question.

As 12th Man walked down the aisle toward the back of the bus, he asked the rest of us: “What about them Seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeahawks?!”

There weren’t many passengers on the bus (it was after 8 PM on a Saturday), and the few who were weren’t feelin’ 12th Man, who had clearly hit the herb a little too hard before leaving the house. While everyone else looked out the window, I decided to show him some love. (I appreciated his enthusiasm and was still giddy at the prospect of a team from my city in the actual playoffs.) “Go Hawks!” I said.

12th Man was all for it. “See? She know about them Seahawks.”

Despite the fact that he received no further encouragement, 12th Man continued his attempts to rouse his fellow passengers for as long as we were on the bus. As we got off, he called to me, “Make sure you tell ’em about them Seahawks, girl!”

As it happens, I’ll get a chance to do just that. Who knew when we planned the trip to XL to celebrate DBH’s city that we’d be celebrating mine as well?

We’re headed to the D, baby!

Here’s hoping the Hawks take it all the way again this season. Busnerd’s brother lives less than an hour from Miami…

Seafair weekend, Bus Chick style

Saturday, 8/5

Umoja bus
Metro on parade at Umojafest

• Umoja parade
This year was more of the usual: classic cars, kiddie drill teams, and frats and sororities stepping. One thing that was new to me (perhaps because I rarely sit through an entire parade): Metro participated, providing decorated, articulated, hybrid buses to transport parade officials–at least I think they were parade officials. Whoever they were, they were passing out balloons to the kids.

• Errand at Northgate
I rode the 41 for the first time. So apparently, did everyone else in Seattle; it was one crowded bus.

• Dinner with our (very fabulous) friend Tony
We took the 16 from Northgate to his place, then (gasp!) rode in his car to Dinette. It’s a small car, and there were three of us, if that counts for anything.

Sunday, 8/6

• Church
After the service: trash emptying duties at Good Shepherd’s adopted stop. Hot gum is not a stop adopter’s friend.

• Parental visit
The westbound 27 was crowded with all the people coming from the lake. In the confusion, an older gentleman, who was standing (and probably shouldn’t have been) near the front, somehow managed to start a confrontation with a couple sitting in the reserved area with their two babies. The confrontation resulted in the couple angrily exiting the bus and the old man calling the cops on his cell, alerting them to the dangerous family on the loose downtown. The driver, despite his obvious irritation, followed procedure and pulled over at the next stop, to await the arrival of both the police and a Metro supervisor. The other passengers, less than thrilled about the idea of sitting on a parked bus (and apparently not bound to any particular procedure), began yelling at the older gentleman, calling him names and telling him to sit down and shut up.

Sadly, I can’t tell you how the story ends. I had a water taxi to catch.

• Return from parental visit
On the water taxi ride back downtown, a couple got engaged…sort of.

A few minutes into the ride, a guy named Mike got on the PA system and announced that the six months he had spent with a Miss Brea Youn (I’m guessing at the spelling, of course) had been the best of his life. Would Brea, he wanted to know, be willing to spend the rest of hers with him? A lovely young woman three rows from the captain’s booth (I’ll assume it was Brea) stopped digging in her purse long enough to give Mike (and all of the curious people watching) the “thumbs up” sign. Mike ran over to Brea, hugged her, and then returned to the group of friends he’d been standing with before the announcement. Brea finally found what she had been digging for–her pink Razr phone–and made a call, which she continued for the remainder of the ride. Meanwhile, her intended stayed huddled at the back of the boat with his friends.

Right before we docked, Mike asked Brea to take a picture with him (and, of course, his friends) to commemorate the moment. She obliged, pausing her conversation only long enough to say cheese.

“If you’re going to sell dope…”

“…don’t do it in front of a camera.”

So was the advice of one of the six transit cops who busted a man and a woman in the process of such a transaction at the 3rd Avenue stop between James and Yesler.

Ladies and gentleman, there are cameras in bus shelters these days, even in some that are not across the street from courthouses. Just so you know.

On a serious note: The popularity of the show Cops has always baffled me. There is nothing more unpleasant than watching an arrest.

48 + 16 = love

Yesterday, Busnerd and I had to go to Northgate to run an errand. We started our trip on the 48 and spent about 20 minutes of the ride sitting behind a pretty standard instance of college bus luh: a jock-looking guy and a ponytailed girl, holding hands, rubbing each other’s shoulders and thighs, and kissing occasionally. We caught the 16 at 82nd and Wallingford (incidentally, in front of my youngest brother Joel‘s old high school) and rode with a few more couples to Northgate Way and 5th Ave NE. The store we visited was also filled with couples in love (yes, folks, we were ordering our wedding rings), and so was the stop where we waited after we were finished. (Actually, there were two other people at the stop–a guy and a girl–and I can’t prove that they were in love or even that they were a couple, but I’m going with it for the sake of the story.)

The 16 ride back to 82nd and Wallingford was uneventful, as was the 48 ride back to my neighborhood–that is, until the bus was delayed less than a block from my stop by a fire truck backing into the station. During the wait, a man approached us and asked (in Spanish) to borrow a pen. I handed him one of the many in my bus chick bag, at which point he returned to the back to perform a bus mack on a woman who was riding with her pre-teen son, and who, as far as I could tell, did not speak a word of Spanish. He managed to get the digits nonetheless (wish I’d been close enough peep his technique), and after he had finished writing them down, he politely thanked her.

Her reply:

“No, thank you. I really needed this.”