You know who I hate? Fucking tram people. I know, I know, I’m fortunate enough to live in one of the very fucking few areas of Melbourne that even has public transport, and yes, if I wasn’t so fucking lazy I could just ride my fucking bike to work, but that’s not the point. The point is that these people are the worst possible mixture of stupid, arrogant, inconsiderate and downright fucking incompetent. Yarra Trams should be paying us to use this fucking ‘service’.
But maybe I’m being a bit harsh – maybe other tram lines aren’t so shabby. I mean, to be fair, at one end of our line is fucking redneck hicksville (which doubles as the former centre of fascist Melbourne), and the other end… well. It goes past a fucking market. The Victoria fucking market. I guess this tram never really stood a chance.
In between the mad flannelette-clad 'people' dragging wheeled shopping jeeps on board and over my feet, and the dickhead students bound for the high school up the road, are the suits heading for their Collins Street offices. It’s difficult to work out if they’re worse when they travel in packs, or lone. I mean, there’s the pros and cons of both; In packs, they guffaw loudly, they wave their coffees about rather dangerously, and they talk utter bollocks whilst taking up the largest imaginable space you’d never have thought possible - But at least you can see all their faces well enough to be able to visualise punching them. When travelling alone, they yell and rant incoherently into their mobile phones, and they flap their arms uncontrollably in a last ditch effort to make the person they’re talking to (probably in another city) understand what they’re bullshitting on about. Either way, they’re an obstacle to be negotiated with extreme caution and a blunt, heavy object.
Trams also have tram drivers, which are a whole different species of crazy. My favourite one is this completely fucking mad woman who uses the external speakers on her vehicle to scream at Caulfieldian skateboarders, and in one rather odd case, myself & mooky as we got off the her tram in St Kilda. According to her sources, we were going to be raped… and enjoy it.
I’m not at all sure what we did to deserve that particular comment, other than consider forming a defensive squad of passengers to take her on if things got out of hand, which frankly, was on the cards. I mean, the cops recently caught some kid who had a liking for tram theft… who would then go and operate the tram as normal, stopping at all the points, etc – but for fucks sake! He was doing the job, he was courteous and polite, and he didn’t abuse the fucking public! Sure, he hadn’t been trained, and his safety standards might be a little rusty, but that’s not the fucking point! Give the boy a job!
It's not like all public transport is like this. On trains, people are generally fairly civilised. They don’t normally behave like caged apes. But this sort of etiquette flies right out the window on trams, and I’m just not at all sure what causes it. But for now, I’m going to assume that the sort of people who catch trams (tourists and country bumpkins aside) are the same dickheads who insist on using USB-Flash drives as portable hard drives. If I had my way, I’d have every last fucking one of those devices crushed, just so people like this can’t get their hands on them. If you’re yet to catch on why pen-drives and their ilk offend me so much, let me fill you in…
1) Flash drives are notoriously crap. They’re fine if you want to transport file x from one point to another, but they’re unreliable as all fuck and have a massive fail rate. And once they’re dead, you can kiss the data on it goodbye. Always keep a reliable backup.
2) I used to work as tech support in universities. Combine your average academic with a device that they can hang around their neck and store files on, and I guarantee a good percentage of them will delete everything on their PC, instead opting to store their digital lives on something small enough to comfortably shove up their own arse.
You can warn them, and then warn them again, but they will still insist on doing this. Fuck knows why. I mean, if academics were equipped with self destruct buttons, I swear a good number of them would spend all day pressing it, and then complaining about the ensuing mess. Arseholes.
Again, I will point out that not all academics are this bad – just quite a few of them… and I’ll bet they all catch fucking trams.
p.s. - Happy 6 months, rantolotl!
Trams also have tram drivers, which are a whole different species of crazy. My favourite one is this completely fucking mad woman who uses the external speakers on her vehicle to scream at Caulfieldian skateboarders, and in one rather odd case, myself & mooky as we got off the her tram in St Kilda. According to her sources, we were going to be raped… and enjoy it.
I’m not at all sure what we did to deserve that particular comment, other than consider forming a defensive squad of passengers to take her on if things got out of hand, which frankly, was on the cards. I mean, the cops recently caught some kid who had a liking for tram theft… who would then go and operate the tram as normal, stopping at all the points, etc – but for fucks sake! He was doing the job, he was courteous and polite, and he didn’t abuse the fucking public! Sure, he hadn’t been trained, and his safety standards might be a little rusty, but that’s not the fucking point! Give the boy a job!
It's not like all public transport is like this. On trains, people are generally fairly civilised. They don’t normally behave like caged apes. But this sort of etiquette flies right out the window on trams, and I’m just not at all sure what causes it. But for now, I’m going to assume that the sort of people who catch trams (tourists and country bumpkins aside) are the same dickheads who insist on using USB-Flash drives as portable hard drives. If I had my way, I’d have every last fucking one of those devices crushed, just so people like this can’t get their hands on them. If you’re yet to catch on why pen-drives and their ilk offend me so much, let me fill you in…
1) Flash drives are notoriously crap. They’re fine if you want to transport file x from one point to another, but they’re unreliable as all fuck and have a massive fail rate. And once they’re dead, you can kiss the data on it goodbye. Always keep a reliable backup.
2) I used to work as tech support in universities. Combine your average academic with a device that they can hang around their neck and store files on, and I guarantee a good percentage of them will delete everything on their PC, instead opting to store their digital lives on something small enough to comfortably shove up their own arse.
You can warn them, and then warn them again, but they will still insist on doing this. Fuck knows why. I mean, if academics were equipped with self destruct buttons, I swear a good number of them would spend all day pressing it, and then complaining about the ensuing mess. Arseholes.
Again, I will point out that not all academics are this bad – just quite a few of them… and I’ll bet they all catch fucking trams.
p.s. - Happy 6 months, rantolotl!
5 comments:
WHA??? A tram driver informing you and mooky that you were going to be raped? I never heard about that and I wonder how many other passengers she has made bizzare comments to!
My favourite tram driver would be this guy (who I'm sure some of you are familar with);
"Welcome aboard the tram, we are rocking and a rollin"
"See you later alligator"
"Welcome to Bourke St Mall where all the fun begins"
Sings: "I feel the Earth move under my train"
Jesus - I've been on that guys' tram too, and it's exactly as Bozza says. More than mildly disturbing. It's that point when travellers start sort of looking at each other, just to check that they're not hallucinating.
Ah I ment "I feel the Earth move under my tram" not train.
Sounds worse than Coventry buses. For those not aware of how dodgy the buses in Coventry are, here's a few things I've seen:
-Kids puncturing a full can of deodorant then immediately flinging it towards the front end like a smoke bomb.
-A driver who was happy to let kids throw metal tools from the back window into the windscreens of moving cars.
-A driver who meditated with his eyes shut WHILE DRIVING!
-A driver who thought it would be a great laugh to do a wheelie on a bridge.
There we other nutcases, but I never heard of drivers telling passengers they were gonna get raped and like it. Touch wood.
Wow, you have academics who actually know how to use a USB drive?!
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