The Drunk Busdriver

Years ago, I was taking the 10 Wolseley downtown to my friend's house who lived on Kennedy near York. Everyone else got off the bus at Osborne, so it was just me and the busdriver. For those who have caught the 10 downtown, you will know that the bus will sometimes sit at the stop by the Legislature for a few minutes to catch up to the schedule or take a break. So there I am, sitting alone on the bus...

20 minutes go by and the whole time I'm thinking, "Geez, I should have just walked! It's only two stops away", but then I'd think that any second now he's going to pull away so I might as well stay on the bus. But then another 10 minutes went by, I had it and got off.

I walked along the bus route to my friend's place and sure enough, I'm not a block away and the bus passes me! But what makes this story interesting is when I turned the corner on to York I was shocked to see that the bus had missed the turn onto Vaughn and crashed into an office building! I ran to see if the bus driver was ok and when I got to the window, he was in a daze. He then grabbed a big bottle of whiskey, whipped his head back and started chugging the whole bottle of booze!

This was before I had a cellphone, so I didn't call it in but I figured this busdriver would be in enough shit already when they find him drunk behind the wheel, crashed into a building.

And for the record, this guy was not fired - I saw him a month later driving the 10 and the same thing happened that he was just sitting at a stop and not moving. This time he stunk like rotten fish. When I got off the bus after I had enough of waiting for him to move, I walked to the front to see what he was doing and he was taping pictures of random people and kids to the window beside him.