Be Excellent To Each Other

Every day I get a free bus from the train station to just outside my office. Most of the bus drivers are miserable turd-faced gits from whom it is almost impossible to raise a grunt from. This is pretty consistent with all bus drivers I've ever known.

However there's one guy, who I'm going to call Bob, that is ace. First of all, he's a good driver. That means he pulls away slowly, and stops gradually, unlike the other cunts who think banging hard on the brake in a series of sharp jerks is the best way to stop a bus with standing passengers.

Secondly, Bob takes no shit. He checks every ticket and pass carefully and if there's a problem he won't let you on the bus. Since he's a dude however, if someone has the wrong ticket he'll patiently explain which bus it qualifies them for, what number it is, what it looks like, and how often its due to arrive. He also carefully notes how many people are on the bus and does not allow it to go above the recommended number.

A couple of weeks ago when the bus was full, Bob closed the doors and started to pull away. An irate person at the bus stop angrily banged on the door because they couldn't get on, so Bob stopped the bus, and opened the doors. The man, who'd thought his anger would be repaid by a seat on the bus, was faced his Bob angrily telling him not to bang on his Bus' doors. Then Bob pointed to his glasses and said 'See these glasses? They're really good for looking, and I know your face now'. The man, totally deflated, didn't have a word to say as we pulled away.

Finally, my bus is free between certain points on the route but doesn't allow me to travel all the way to the station, which is unfortunate as I have to get off early and walk the rest of the way. If it's pissing with rain, however, and Bob is driving, he'll shout down the bus to any 'free' passengers and tell them that he'll drive us all to the station for no extra charge, to save us getting pissed on.

I like Bob, he's a hero, simply because he's a proper, decent bus driver who takes his job seriously and does it well.

Anyone have any local service people they regard in a similar manner?

Bob sounds awesome.

I don't know any awesome people, off the top of my head. Everyone I know is shit. I'll have a good think though.

We called a plumber called Martin on Christmas Eve when our boiler broke. He came round, took it all apart cleaned various bits and resoldered the dry joint on the PCB that was causing the problem. He refused to take any money off us as he said he was out that way anyway and didn't need to use any parts.

I think you ought to take a photo of Bob and add it to this thread. It could be a our gallery of Excellent People.

The lady in our local fish-n-chip-n-chinese-takeaway shop is always very nice and often gives me a free bottle of pop for plaicing large orders. She even greets me by my name.

I'm not going to get hooked into a load of bad fish puns.

Come on, chaps. Don't carp on.

Sir Thanxalot?

The only person I can think of (I live in London, need I say more?) is Norman the fruit and veg man on the market. Actually I haven't bought anything off him for ages because I'm usually rushing to get to work, but when I did and the sum total of my three pieces of fruit came to say 40p, rather than taking my quid and faffing about with change he'd often take 30p in silvers instead and forgo the 10p. I used to return the favour occasionally and give him a bit more than he asked for so neither of us really benefited from it, but it used to make me feel a bit better about humanity first thing on a Monday morning.

I'd like to add my old post lady Sue to this list. When I used to live with my mom, she knew what time my mom would come back from shopping so if my mom wasn't around in the morning, she would finish the rest of her deliveries and then come back.

She rarely had to leave a card for us to pick up things.. In fact, once she saw my moms car on the car park and waited around to give her my parcels!

Occasionally my postie is actually a very good old friend of mine, who always takes the time to draw comedy spunking cocks all over my mail when he deilvers. Seeing as I'm living with my parents at the moment, it does raise a few eyebrows when mum picks the post up off the doormat.

Superbad!

I didn't know Dimrill worked for the post office. EDIT - outside of mafiasum.

I thought we agreed we were all super duper?

Ha ha, no, I just codn't resist.

She is awesome, although not as funny as the previous lady that worked there that used to answer the phone by bellowing "Harro... BROO-CHIP". She was ace, and was always laughing. Really brightened up my day going there when she was serving.

It's called blue-chip, see

Harro? We saw her on the tv during the Nottingham meet.

All the staff of the Aquarius chip shop on Kingshill Avenue in Hayes. Horrible town, pretty nasty, greasy, hot and abused-by-cunts job, but they're lovely, lovely people and always had a genuine smile for people. They were friendly but respectful of boundaries, and remembered your typical order even if you hardly ever came in. You know when people in shops and such wish you a good day and you can tell they mean it? They were all like that. Top blokes, and their chips were good too.

My old, now retired vet. A lovely bloke with a very dry and subtle sense of humour, who clearly cared about the animals he worked with, but wasn't at all squeamish about pinning them down or slicing them open if necessary. And he was nice to people, too - more than once, he refused to charge us when there was nothing significant wrong with our cat or dog, and he sometimes performed minor operations and such for free, without notice. The receptionists there were lovely as well, come to think of it.

The two blokes who cut short their holiday and walked across a busy motorway and just stood obstinately in front of the speeding cars until they stopped, so that they could come and see if anyone was hurt when my family's car's tire exploded, lost control, spun around a couple of times and crashed into the barrier, wrecking it completely. They made sure me and my sister (then about 8 and) were okay, calmed my panicking mum down (not an easy task, as I later found) and sat us all down while they arranged for someone to come and pick us up. They stopped the traffic again and pushed our knackered car (it looked an absolute state, seriously. It's amazing we weren't hurt) across the road out of everyone's way, and got us all safely to where we were going and our car carted off appropriately, all for nothing at all, while hundreds of other people just drove straight past. I have absolutely no idea who they were.

Also the off-duty nurse who happened to be driving past when I got my head split open by a rock and would have bled to death if not for her. I can't even remember what she looked like on account of all the blood in my eyes, and I pobably traumatised her young son by bleeding all over the place about a foot from where he was sitting.

Everyone who ever tried to be nice just for its own sake. Because:

All my favourite bus drivers are the ones that "seem" drunk. "Seem".