A bus driver in a good mood.

This morning I left my house after a restless night of little sleep, ran to starbucks to get a badly burnt, badly made vanilla latte (why can’t Korea make better coffee!?!?!?) sprinted to the bus stop only to see the two busses I can take to school rush by as I desperately yelled for them to stop, and finally caught my bus 10 minutes too late, only to have my worst nightmare stare me straight in the face as I climbed the short steps onto my bus. From the driver’s seat, I heard a loud and enthusiastic, “Anyong Haseyo!” come out of the mouth of my smiling bus driver, as his kind eyes twinkled at me as if to say “Thank you for riding my bus! Welcome aboard!”

This is my worst fear. A bus driver in a good mood. I plan the timing of my morning around the assumption that my bus driver will be pissed off, angry, and in a hurry so that I can get to work on time. They sail through red lights, zoom through pedestrian crossings, nearly give the old Korean Grandmas a heart attack as they floor it while she’s still trying to find her bus card, and come to a halting rather than gradual stop, causing a wide-eyed and fearful frenzy at every bus stop as someone frantically waves, jumps, and then runs to the bus which stopped a good 10 meters ahead of the appropriate location. This is what gets me to work on time. This is what creates a calm, easy, and relaxed start to my morning.

This morning, however, after being greeted with the friendly hello, I knew it was going to be a disaster. This dreadfully happy driver calmly waited at every stop light, while other buses rushed past, laughed and smiled after nearly crushing a clueless old man, who, rather than waiting on the curb for the bus, waited in the middle of the intersection, and even waited for a solid 3 minutes at one stop because he saw a woman sprinting from literally a half a mile away towards the bus. And then we had to wait for a train. Needless to say, I was nearly 15 minutes late to work.

Bus drivers simply aren’t meant to be nice. It throws world order out of whack.