Volvo Escapades

I have been travelling to and from my workplace in the Volvo buses for some time now and have started to enjoy all idiosyncracies such a travel brings about. Some incidents were noteworthy for the sheer cheek involved while others will be remembered for the dosage of humour.

Escapade 1 - Working in the service industry means attending calls at what are termed "not normal" hours. I am not in favour of taking calls while travelling in public transport considering you are with a set of unknown people and I tend to talk too loud ( I have never been able to moderate my tone!). However, after joining a function that is termed sensitive, I am forced to take calls while on my journey back home. I usually keep my inputs to a minimum so that people across how many ever seas do not hear the lovely background noise. During one such instance, I was standing next to the driver and realized that he loved honking and I had to talk during the call! So, what does this woman do? I turned around and begged the driver not to honk for a minute until I finished speaking! If only the driver and I had a camera! As stunned as the driver was with my request, there was the saner me thinking that the woman who spoke to the driver was most definitely an alien. I would have framed the resultant pictures! The driver, however, did accede to my request. He keenly listened to me talk and did not honk until after I completed the call. The very good me smiled and said "Thank You"! The driver said "Welcome Madam" and honked!

Escapade 2 - Reel life meets real life. On what was just another day in my life, the bus I was travelling in was at the Jayadeva Hospital traffic signal waiting for the light to go green. I was on another one of those calls albeit a mute participant this time around. The scene that kept me in splits for the rest of the night - I glance out of the window, guy is walking on the road instead of the footpath, he misses colliding with an auto, makes a goofy face at the auto driver and turns to see if someone was looking. When he realized that he had an audience in me, he smiled and I burst out laughing. A moment later I realized that I was in a bus, a cellphone held against my ear for 15 minutes, not talking at all, laughing out loud at an unknown person on the street and that unknown person kept looking back to check whether I was still laughing. What a scene it must have been to an onlooker!