I told you yesterday about my recent resolution to be Holly Happypants on the bus so that I might lead others to good behavior by my example. Well, everything was going swimmingly on the bus the next day, with me not blowing up at a high school kid who was propping his elbow up on my shoulder to help him hang onto the strap, me getting a really comfortable seat one stop after I got on, and the bus being generally uncrowded. By the time we got to Wall Street, there were only a handful of people left, so no one made anything of it when a man began making the longest and most obnoxious phone call.

He was clearly talking to a customer service representative at a company that deals in batteries and started the conversation by angrily demanding to know if they had his particular battery in stock, though he couldn’t actually name the battery. “The one MY radio takes,” he said, as if that was any help. He gave the person his name and phone number and told him or her that his radio looks like an iPod. And then he began berating the person, getting increasingly more aggressive:

“I’m so tired of you people not doing your jobs.”
“Do you have the battery or not?”
“I know YOU don’t know, so go find someone else who does.”
“What am I supposed to do–call back every day until you get the battery in?”
“You’re not educated enough for me to talk to.”
“Give me your supervisor.”
“I want to talk to your supervisor!”

Everything was repeated twice for emphasis and said in the loudest and rudest of voices in the sort of accent that Angelina from “Jersey Shore” had. It was unbearable and almost incredible that a human could talk to another human that way, but we were almost at my stop, and I had that whole pact with myself about trying extra hard to behave myself on public transportation, so I grabbed a nutrition bar from my bag and popped a chunk of it in my mouth to keep myself otherwise occupied.

Just then, the bus stopped at the traffic light before the turn into the Staten Island Ferry station, and people in the back started yelling. The bus has to wait at that light every single day, so there shouldn’t have been a problem, but that day was strange for some reason. Traffic had been inching along all the way down from 42nd Street, the sky was overcast with rain, and this guy had been literally yelling into his phone–the air was thick with tension.

Someone in the back was saying, “The light is green! THE LIGHT IS GREEN! GO, bus driver!” Hilariously, I realized it was the same lady from the day before who complimented my hair and whom I was glad I hadn’t been rude to before despite her totally deserving it.

People began yelling back at her: “The light’s red!” “Check your eyes!” “Be quiet if you don’t know what’s going on!” It was complete chaos, as if everything everyone had wanted to say to one another all morning and every morning was spewing out now.

Someone said, “Some people around here need to get driver’s licenses!”, and I believe she was talking to the woman who didn’t know the difference between a red and green light, but the guy who had been making the obnoxious phone call screamed out, “YEAH! ALL THESE BUS DRIVERS SUUUUUUUUUUCK!”

And at that point, it was just too much for me, and I said, “Oh, my gosh, shut up!” That’s not really a phrase I use, but it had been building up in me for ten minutes, and it came out without warning.

I had been talking into the ether, but I guess Obnoxious Phone Call Guy took it personally and said to me, “YOU shut up!”

Read the super-juicy ending here and get so mad both for me and at me!