Do Something
Here's my latest angry email to Muni. I am promised that these complaint letters have an impact.
Hello,
Unfortunately, I didn't write down the bus number -- I was simply too angry at the time to remember to do so. And I couldn't get the driver's number, because he had covered up his uniform with a jacket. But I've complained about this driver's difficulty adhering to schedules in the past; all you would have to do, to find his number, would be to look up my prior complaints about timeliness from a few months ago. Here are the details of the latest problem:
Monday morning, I was waiting for the 33, eastbound, at Fulton/Stanyan. The night before, I'd sprained my foot, and so I was walking slowly and with a limp. I was the only person waiting at the stop, but when the 33 arrived, the driver pulled up well past me; when it stopped, I was about even with the back of the bus.
I walked down the sidewalk towards the front door -- slowly, and with a limp, since I'd injured my foot. As I put my first foot on the step of the bus, the driver chose that moment to close the doors so that my body was jammed between them. A few seconds passed, during which I expected him to open the doors. He didn't. I had to push them open myself to continue boarding the bus.
I didn't exchange any words with him -- I just wanted to get on the bus, go to work, and put the incident behind me. Aside from pushing open the doors that had been closed on my body, I didn't indicate that I was unhappy. But the driver said, as I was boarding, "you need to calm down."
An apology would have been nice -- for making me limp down the street, for slamming the door on me, for not opening the door once I was stuck between them. But telling me to calm down, when I had responded completely calmly and dispassionately to his awful customer service, was probably the worst thing he could have said.
To make matters worse, this driver had, as usual, delayed the start of his run by 10 minutes so that the bus on the next run had already bunched up immediately behind him. That's an issue I've complained against many times with no resolution, so I'm resigned to it never being fixed. But a driver who treats riders this poorly is simply astonishing.
Thanks for your attention to this issue.
Matt Baume
