Dinosaur_Ass_Tattoos

There's a movie with Patrick Swayze, Meat Loaf, Randy Travis, and Gabriel Casseus where Patrick Swayze is a truck driver. He talks about the black dog you see after you've been on the road for too long and start getting too tired. It'll come out of nowhere in the middle of the night and dart out at you, and you'll think it's real and try to avoid it. I thought it was just some made up movie plot til the first time I saw it when I was really tired on an overnight. Not necessarily a dog, but any hallucination of something darting out in front of the bus. Happened quite a few times, very scary

The clientele. Even in training they tell us we'll be driving the nations bail jumpers, fleeing felons, ex cons, pimps and prostitutes. In my experience though, most of my passengers were pleasant and just wanted to get from A to B. A lot of the stations are a hub of homelessness, beggars, and especially in NYC, the mentally ill. The ones Greyhound owns though largely employ some sort of security that keeps it restricted to ticketed passengers and those waiting for them (Philly for example), but again, not always the classiest of people. Between riding and driving, I've never had an issue that was truly concerning.

The bad rep also comes from the way they operate. Just because you have a ticket with a specific time and specific date, it doesn't mean you're guaranteed a seat on that bus. They just keep selling tickets regardless of how many seats are available. At the larger terminals like NYC they'll often bring out another bus or two to handle the overflow, but only if they can find a bus and a driver (they are perpetually short drivers). At a lot of the smaller stops, like Wilmington DE, If there aren't enough seats, you gotta wait for the next one which can be several hours. You also hear of drivers getting lost a lot. That's because they give us these paper directions that are often wrong or haven't been updated since god knows when (best one I had was telling me to take a road to the 2nd casino entrance marked hotels, but the road had since been turned into a highway and the exit to access the casino was actually 2 miles back). Even when they are right, we're trying to drive the bus, read the directions, and watch for the street sign signs. They train us on as many stops as possible for the city that we work out of, but it's impossible to cover all of them in the time they spend training us, and for the ones we do go to, it's impossible to remember them all of one visit. To give you an idea, an NYC based driver has a typical range they'll send us to of Bangor ME, Montreal QB, Cleveland OH, and Norfolk/Richmond VA, with dozens of stops in between, but drivers have ended up getting sent as far as Minneapolis, Florida, Atlanta, etc. Oh and sometimes we cover other companies schedules and have to do their stops, like Peter Pan and Adirondack Trailways. It's honestly a miracle getting lost doesn't happen more often

Pick your poison. There's my last night of training driving blind through a blizzard (16 inches of snow, zero visibility) all night long on an interstate that was shut down at 25mph for 10 hours. Had an inch of ice frozen onto some parts of the windshield.

There's the time I was doing NYC to Boston and the destination sign was stuck on Tijuana so in my thickest Spanish accent I announced "okay ladies and yentlemen gwelcone aboard the Greyhound lines to Tijuana Mexico making the one stop in boson Massachusetts, uhhh mi nombre Javier, okay we go" and then burnt out the brakes trying to follow another bus that was flying in the rain because it was my first time going into Boston

Or there's post Greyhound where I worked for this one company in Austin TX where I had to outrun a tornado while driving across Louisiana. Or my first ever job with them which I'll post below tomorrow

Or the sketchy Russian company I used to drive for where the AC went out in Orlando in May and my boss told me to go to Walmart and buy as many fans as I could plug into the outlets and drive back to NYC. I asked him if he wanted me to buy the ones that spray mist too.

Greyhounds policy in routing. That and they frown upon having any type of distracting devices, such as a GPS

That's exactly the reaction I would have. Makes you jump.