My trust in bus drivers

There are trustworthy groups of people, or professions, in all cultures, depending on their history, but also on personal experience. For some, these are police officers or firemen, or teachers, or monks, or elderly ladies. Fathers of little children seem trustworthy.

I trust bus drivers. I am not sure why that is considering that one of my first experiences with a bus driver wasn’t a positive one. I was in elementary school when the driver of the school bus, Herr Müller, got so tired of me and my pal Henrik throwing pieces of paper at each other in his bus, that he grabbed Henrik by his left ear and dragged him by the ear to the front seat, and hit me, who was sitting in the front already, on my hands with a little stick to make us stop littering. It didn’t really hurt - at least not me, and Henrik wouldn’t admit it - but I was deeply embarrassed even though I tried to play it down by joking around.

But in hindsight I think I deserved it and I am sorry that I made Herrn Müller lose his cool. Maybe this anecdote made bus drivers even trustworthier in my eyes, who knows.

I do not trust taxi drivers as much, and not just because they are not always the most reasonable or friendly people. Once, a Berlin taxi driver, when I asked him to close the window because the draught messed with my hairdo, looked at my hair and said that a bunch of bobby pins didn’t make a hairdo. Admittedly, that is my favorite offense by a taxi driver. On the other hand, I also had an extremely fun taxi ride in London, where the driver, a Scot, sang to me. But usually when I enter a taxi I am always worried to be identified as a tourist and accordingly get ripped off. Though, when I think about it, that only ever happened once in my life.

But back to the bus drivers. I trust them not to rip me off, and to take me safely and as quickly as traffic allows from A to B. Yesterday however, this faith got shaken, when my bus stopped in the middle of nowhere in Iceland and people who wanted to go to Stykkishólmur had to get out. I wanted to go to Stykkishólmur, but this came as a surprise. There was no sign of houses or a regular bus stop. Also, the schedule did not indicate a change of buses. From the other direction came a smaller bus, however, that picked me and a fellow passenger, who looked as confused as I was, up, and we continued our ride to Stykkishólmur. Faith restored.