A while ago I, among others, were harassed on the bus. Four young boys were yelling verbal abuse at the other riders, spitting at and indeed on them and otherwise behaving in a threatening and antisocial manner. A poor girl sat in front of me got off of the bus nearly in tears, only to have the kids spit at her through the window – I only hope she at least reached her stop and wasn’t driven off the bus early by the savages.
It was impossible for the bus driver not to notice, yet he did nothing. Noone complained, mostly due to fear of drawings the kids attention, especially since the chances of the bus driver taking action seemed pretty slim given he had done nothing at all so far.
The system seems so unfair and unjust, innocent riders like myself have no recourse but to ride out such incidents when the bus driver does nothing and retaliation is feared due to being condemned for assault. Who can we go to for help? The police? Could they even do anything? We feel powerless when those in authority do nothing and any chance of defending ourselves is taken away by fear of being branded a criminal. Does anyone have any faith that if they complained the camera footage would be watched and the kids consequently caughr? The answer is no. Most think little would happen and any justice handed out meaningless. Not only that but also the fear of retribution, what if the kids took revenge for any punishment or investigation against them? They surely saw the people they tormented and could recognise them again.
I myself feel guilty. I might have done something, but one can not help but feel one is making oneself a target for these thugs when you do, and when you have such little faith or hope of a good outcome, fear is a powerful motivator to sit down and hope things don’t get worse.
When did bus drivers stop caring about their passengers wellbeing? When was it ok for things like this to go on unchallenged? When was it that even retaliation and self defence were things to fear, afraid our own protectors would mark us as criminals?
In fact, I asked this very question of the bus company themselves and their response wasn’t very helpful.
Essentially it boiled down to “We can’t do anything and nor can our drivers, call the police and have them deal with it.”
Now, I can understand that they can hardly make it company policy to put their drivers in harms way, nor would I want them to, but the driver is in a position of authority and at the very least, if they don’t want to get into a confrontation they could perhaps call the police themselves from the relative safety of their concealed seating.
The main problem with calling the police as a passenger is that you are in full view of the assailants and you don’t know how they will react. Will they steal your phone and beat you up? Will they stab you? Will they leave and remember your face to come and get you at a later date? You don’t know. There is the additional worry of phoning. Most people don’t know the number for the police directly, they only know 999 and nobody wants to phone 999 so they can essentially say “someone’s picking on me on the bus”. Doing that in and of itself feels like a crime that could put a ‘real’ emergency call at risk of being answered too late and no-one wants to be told of by the emergency services for wasting their time, which I think is actually a crime.
It’s shit like this that fuels my misanthropy.
Sam, 
Jammerg55, 
me and 2 others are discussing. 
Apparently I nearly ate a frisbee, but I don’t recall this (maybe it’s the concussion 
Simon is discussing. 
Chav Hater, 
Lorcian, and 
Devo are discussing. 
Jonas Wisser 1:44 pm on June 18, 2009 Permalink
Have you tried the Boot Camp drivers from a prerelease of Snow Leopard? It takes some fishing around to find the right installer in the image (particularly if you’re running 64-bit Windows—the top-level 64-bit installer may proclaim that you can’t run the Boot Camp installer on your hardware, but there’s another 64-bit installer in there that will happily run if you double-click it), but I’m running a MacBook 5,1 with Snow Leopard/Windows 7/Jaunty and that solved all my Windows driver issues.
My triple-boot is based on your walkthrough, by the way—so thanks for that!
Dark Liquid 6:10 am on June 19, 2009 Permalink
No I haven’t. Good thinking there, I’ll try snow leopard and see what happens. It’s incredibly frustrating though.
Glad you found the walk-through useful though. Glad to be of service
Dark Liquid 10:44 pm on June 19, 2009 Permalink
Just tried those drivers and they worked a treat. Thanks for the advice.
me 10:51 pm on October 2, 2009 Permalink
dude….get linux…end of story
I only use windows whe I need my Adobe apps. After that it’s debian.
Jammerg55 11:48 pm on April 2, 2010 Permalink
Since the advent of Vista and W7 I have decided until they fix their stupid sound issue that I refuse to upgrade from XP Pro, Why you might ask? Well because if for some reason you are listening some music watching a show/movie/anime episode or playing a game, if you just so happen to accidentally unplug your sound device it either causes the program to crash or simply not work, Which is extremely aggravating especially if you have many cats and are in the middle of a 2.5h movie and it crashes. Oh and another thing that stupid comsurrogate that handles pictures in windows plain sucks as it takes for ever to go between pictures when you are looking at more than 10 at a time. So far i see no improvement in speed or anything and being seemingly based off of Vista tech i don’t like it.
Jammerg55 11:49 pm on April 2, 2010 Permalink
oh yeah i dont run linux because it doesnt support direct draw which is required on many of my games.
Sam 6:25 pm on December 12, 2011 Permalink
Oh for the love of GOD!! I cannot believe we live in the year 2011 and Microsoft still can’t get it right!! Who the -ell wants to pay this much for a new pc and not be able to install games from xp. I for the life of me just don’t get it. What year is Microsoft living in? Window 7 is nothing but a piece of crap that sits here with me having to hunt and dig for stuff that should be easy to find. Don’t even go to ‘Windows xp mode” that is not for the every day common people but for businesses only! What a piece of crap! JMO