The Shuttle Bus from Hell (Part 1)

One of the worst jobs I've ever had in my life involved giving up my weekends to bring other people out to have a good time. It was a simple job really; basically an over-glorified taxi-cab, but instead of the usual New Yorker passengers, it was a bunch of college drunkards. And instead of a stereotype with beaded seats and hard to understand accent, there was me: awkward underclassmen who needed to grow a pair and lay down the law but never did.

My weekend consisted of: coffee shop from 6am-noon, then the shuttle job from 12:45-6pm, and then again from 8:45pm-1am-ish and then pass out for a couple of hours to repeat the whole lovely thing for Sunday. It was awful because I'd be so tired that I'd fall asleep at the wheel (Oddly enough, I'd only fall asleep if it was only me in the van, and I could still drive/sleep with my eyes open). It was awesome because I didn't have time to think between school and work, so I stressed myself almost 30 pounds lighter. My coworkers and I were the first ones to do the shuttle ever, so we got the short end of the stick. I'd talk to people after who had my old job, and they'd say how fun it was, and how it wasn't that bad.

Clearly, it was because my coworkers and I were the ones the got shat on because we were the first and didn't know what to expect. I'll give a few scenarios of a typical night:

1) Fifty thousand girls in the tiniest dresses ever fabricated by Malaysian sweatshop workers, who decided to don these second-skin outfits in the middle of February. Okay, admittedly I'm exaggerating. The van only held about ten people, and barely 1,300 people even attended the school. But try telling 18 pushy, angry, pre-gamed undergrads that there's no more room when it seems like everyone had supposedly been waiting in line before someone else. Even when I'd tell them I wasn't allowed to have more people, they all squeezed their giddy, horny, drunk selves into the seats and bellow at me to crank the tunes. Good times.

2) Was money ever collected? Funny. Instead of a normal number, the fee they'd have to pay was $4 or something equally asinine. So no one ever had change, and they didn't trust the drivers to be able to make change for a $20, so it was either all or nothing. They'd all tell me they would pay for the ride on the way back, and then none of them would take the shuttle back.

3) The Hyper Ones. Shrieking at the tops of their voices, butchering every pop song and squealing "this is my songggg!!!" to every song, it was easy to get a headache. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't get excited. Their happiness was infectious. For a moment I felt part of the crowd and that we were all going to have an epic time downtown. For a moment, I didn't feel like I was at work, I didn't have to worry about my social circle back at school crumbling at the foundation, I didn't have to worry about homework, bills, classes--you get the idea.

        This was a song everyone was obsessed with and made me hear it in my sleep:

4) The Rule-Breakers. She lights up a cigarette as I'm telling her that she can't smoke in the van, and calmly tells me she's going to open a window, so it'll magically be fine to let everyone else freeze to death while she turns her lungs into a withered black organ hanging pitifully like a rotten grape left on the vine. The rule-breakers believe they are cool; above the law, and most definitely above a goofy underclassman in her pajamas driving a van full of people dressed to the nines. Flash forward a few hours: it's the middle of the night, and two girls are the first to show up to go back to school. They're giggling uncontrollably, and it looks like they became spontaneously pregnant in the 3 hours that they were out partying. They reveal their babies, which turns out to be two full unopened bottles of alcohol that they lifted from a local club. My eyes bugged out of my sockets; was I going to be seen as the accomplice with the getaway vehicle? Did they have videocameras and could they identify the girls? Were they so drunk that they didn't remember actually buying the bottles instead?

5) The Angry Ones. As we're moving, he stands in the center aisle between the driver and passenger seats, and beams empty shotglasses at point-blank range into girls' faces. Why? I have no goddamn clue. Were these glasses stolen as well? Probably. What could I do? Not much. On an unrelated note, I got to show my crazy side when one group of kids started being racist towards other people in the van and I informed them that if we couldn't all get along, I would drive off of the steep roadway and we could all learn peace and acceptance in death. (Yeah, lack of sleep is a scary thing, I don't advise it) Needless to say, they all thought I was batshit crazy and in desperate need of some kind of medication, but it worked! No more racist comments!

That's all for Part 1 of this rant, more to come in the near future. So tired.