Ofcourse, as luck would have it, the Shrek looking soul-brother I had just pissed off turned out to be none other then the bus driver. Which seems kind of crazy to me that not only would the lady at the counter be completely useless and void of any sort of customer service skills, but the bus driver, the guy I was depending upon to deliver me safely to Jacksonville, was also a miserable cocksucker that strutted around as though he were only making $4 an hour. Great.
Scared out of my mind at this point, hating myself over the possibility that I had made some idiotic mistake or misread the instructions on the original Greyhound paperwork, I shuttered to think how I was going to explain this one to my family. Especially my sister.
How would I sound on the phone trying to explain that a trip I had been planning for months on end was killed off pre-maturely with money flushed down some figurative tubes before it had even had a chance to get started. With several years of bad luck and poor decisions behind me, this moment seemed in my head as though it would be the one that would finally change things, cause people to look at me differently, etc. etc.
Luckily for me it was the exact opposite, by the time I had reached Clearwater my sister had called to check up on me and eagerly rushed to my defense against the evil Greyhound empire.
She made several phone calls, getting answers and pressing the issue so hard that by the time I did get to Tampa the manager in the corporate office was there waiting to shake my hand, offer an appology and lend me his personal assistance in resolving the matter.
Pretty impressive stuff, I mean, my sister is smart, super smart. She's like the Derrick Rose of brainiacs. Listening to her on the otherend of a three way call was like hearing, well, I dont know quite what to compare it to but it was pretty damn awesome. She had these nitwits tounge tied and flustered, they didn't know what to do and I could tell they were scared.
What I should have done before leaving the St. Pete station was say to the woman (if you want to call her that) at the counter, "bitch, aiight, you wanna get nuts? I'm calling in the big guns, yeah, I'm gonna call my sister! My sister is so bad, that by Monday morning she will have you selling Greyhound tickets to escimo's in Alaska, so dress warm".
At the ticket counter in the Tampa station the woman helping me on the computer had told me that the issue with my ticket wasn't that it was printed. It was that a schedule change had been made in the bus route and the computer system did not recognize it.
Whatever.
By this point I was ready to just file the damn complaint and move on with my trip to Jacksonville. The woman at the counter, who happened to be black of all things, seemed disinterested with my attempts to impress her with the information that I was traveling to meet none other then Pam Grier, Foxy Brown herself.
On the otherhand the the raggedy old white chain smoker I was trying to weisel a hand job out of turned out to be a big Pam Grier fan and recognized her instantly on the poster I was carrying around.
Now securely seated on this gigantic tin can of a cargo ship designed to transport poor people I was finally on my way to Jacksonville, eager to rendezvous with fellow fans and mingle with my hero's.
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