Our Boxing Day with Greyhound

I must share my Christmas Season Greyhound Experience with you, as I’m curious to know whether it was an anomaly, or common place. As Greyhound has not been reaping the best of public relations recently, I found our Boxing Day visit to the Kamloops bus station quite instructive.

We enjoyed a wonderful visit with Syd’s folks from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, and, in late afternoon, drove them into the station to catch their bus back home. The place was packed, and I mean packed. There are four gates in the station, but trying to figure out if you were in the right lineup was a challenge.

My father-in-law, who is in his late 80s, succeeded in getting tags for their luggage and we got into what we figured was the most likely bet for the right lineup.

“Is this lineup for Gate 2?” a pleasant woman asked?

“Yes, it is,” said Syd. “More or less.”

“Thank you,” she said, and proceeded to jump queue by a dozen or so people. I was, I admit, agape. I hadn’t seen such a stunt since a rude passenger shoved in front of me at the Beijing airport and chewed me out when I objected. This time, I went up the line and tapped her on the shoulder and told her she’d just shoved in ahead of a couple of seniors.

To her credit, she looked apologetic and moved back behind us.

The gates, as it turned out, were little more than suggestions. Every once in awhile, a driver would appear from outside and yell, “Anybody here going to Vancouver?” or “Anybody for Chilliwack?” A chorus would come back from the lineup, “Yes! Chilliwack!” or somesuch thing.

One guy came in and shouted, “Langley, Gate 1!” Then he looked at the door and added, “Or Gate 2 — whatever!”

Well, we were in the Gate 2 group and we certainly weren’t looking to go to Langley, so there was some confusion and head shaking over that one. Fifty minutes after the scheduled departure time for the Okanagan bus, our house guests finally made it through the gate and were directed toward their bus.

We received a call yesterday assuring us they hadn’t ended up in Langley and had actually made it back home.

My observations are these:

1. Greyhound bus passengers are very patient and forgiving people.

2. Greyhound doesn’t have much of a challenge ahead of it in improving holiday service — a functioning PA system, something to separate the lineups, that’s all it would take to make things better than they were that evening. Even buses that run almost an hour late wouldn’t upset anyone if they had just a little more information on how to go about getting through the station.

Agree or disagree?