On a bus with bigots

The black woman in front of me was being moderately inconsiderate about the volume at which she was speaking on the phone.

The random white dude three rows further forward was a complete ass with how he responded to that.

At first it seemed like an acrimonious back and forth between a moderately inconsiderate person on the phone and an asshole who decided to be really rude under cover of fighting rudeness and break the rules about being loud under cover of taking it upon himself to enforce the rules about loudness.

And then he started being a veiled racist while she started being an overt homophobe and transphobe.  (Note, no evidence random white dude was gay or gender non-conforming, she just thought that since he was bad he must be an effeminate gay guy.)

And both of them chose to do this wondrous escalation dance when the driver was occupied with the trickiest part of the driving in the hour we'd been on on the bus and thus couldn't spare the attention to get them to shut the fuck up.

Of course the reason that the driving required more attention was that we were nearing a stop and thus at the stop the bullshit could be dealt width but fuck was it impossible to be sympathetic with anyone involved.

Thinly veiled racism vs. not at all veiled homophobia and transphobia.

And the kicker is that the racist asshole was one row from back from the driver meaning all that had to happen was for the racist asshole to say to the driver, "There's a woman having a long loud conversation that's bothering me," and boom, everything dealt with without us ever coming to learn that he's a racist asshole or she's homophobic and transphobic.

This moment in my life brought to you be Greyhound: "We're not the best, but we're the only people going where you need to go that don't overbook our buses as a matter of policy."

[Added:]

And just to make sure that we didn't forget, as soon as the driver was off the bus at the next stop (driver has to be off to help departing passengers get their luggage and check that incoming passengers actually have tickets) the homophobe, noticing that this was racist's stop, had to call out loud enough for all the bus to hear:

"Bye gay, with your faggot ass.  Bye Fag!"

Oh joy.

Note that being on the bus isn't always like this.  Usually isn't.  But sometimes... some fucking times.