Sodding buses

Oh boy am I pissed off tonight. I decided to do my shopping before heading home from work and got on a bus on Princes Street laden with heavy bags. When I ding the bell to get off the driver very curtly tells me that he doesn't stop until Sighthill. If you don't know Edinburgh this is a big post-war council estate on the edge of town, way beyond my stop. Not two or three stops, but way, way beyond. Basically this guy didn't stop between Princes Street and way out in the boondocks, passing stop after stop after stop because it was a 'limited stop' service. Okay, this was a limited stop service, fair enough, but this wasn't really limited, this was not stopping for miles, a big difference. And more to the bloody point the timetable in the bus shelter doesn't actually say, by the way our crap bus only stops at these handful of points, otherwise I would know not to get on the damned thing.

So I had to ride this fecking bus, trapped on it for ages, only to be dumped way beyond my home in the dark in a part of town I don't know. And since the bastard would only stop at one spot on a busy dual carriageway with no pedestrian crossing anywhere nearby I had a swine of a time trying to traverse four lanes to get to the other damned side to get a bus to take me back the way I came. The useless smegger just kept telling me and another guy who needed to get off that he wasn't allowed to stop - come on, aren't they allowed any discretion on that? I mean what if I had been elderly or disabled, would he still have done this? What a bloody stupid way to run a peak period bus service - nice to get my money's worth from the more than 30 quid a month I pay the sods for my travel pass for buses which never come at the time they are supposed to...

So I finally get home more than twice as late as I should have been, pissed off, struggling with heavy bags and really less than impressed with Lothian Regional Transport's bloody attitude - what amazingly crap customer service; it would be like going into a shop and being told you can only buy this book at this time and not ones from that shelf... As the other guy who was trying to get off remarked, when it is one of their fellow LRT colleagues they damned well stop at other places to let them off (even doing so outwith any official stops) but no, sod the paying customer. The driver told the other bloke that if he had gotten on a train he wouldn't expect it to make other stops. Er, a bus is completely different to a train, you sodding eejit - a train actually tells you at the station what places it will stop, unlike this pathetic service (I mean how the hell are you supposed to know???) and unlike a train it is flexible and can stop and start at the driver's discretion. Useless sods.