I’ve been inspired by a great man, James D. Rolfe, to make a series of notes about what I find to be B.S. in the world. Here’s the first one, and more are sure to follow.

So, you know what’s B.S.? School buses. Everyone has been stuck behind one of these yellow monstrosities at one point or another. Your five minute trip to the gas station becomes an odyssey!

Well, let’s discuss the school bus a little more in-depth. Let’s see how these things are on the inside. If you went to public school, you know that the inside of a bus is a horrible place. In the winter it never seems to be warm enough and in the summer you may as well ride to school in a volcano. Why can’t a school bus be comfortable???

Speaking of comfort, those seats are nothing but metal covered in plastic. As a little kid you would try to get comfortable, but it never worked. You usually just gave up and screamed. That’s probably why buses are so loud. They’re full of the agonizing screams of children.

Now, I know I mentioned the problem with temperature earlier in buses. The solution for temperature problems is the windows. However, these are often the most flawed part of a school bus. Let me elaborate. The windows are almost never shut all the way. They’re always slightly cracked open (a little less than an inch). This let’s all the heat escape in the winter, as well as allow snow inside the bus. Nothing like being cold and wet. In the summer the windows have to be down, but even when they are down a school bus moves so slow that no breeze is created.

Continuing about the windows, why are they so hard to open? I mean, do they think the kids are going to try to jump out and kill themselves. Actually, they probably do want to do that! I wouldn’t blame them. The windows usually work by pushing in two buttons/levers and pulling down or pushing up. These mechanisms soon get rusted and difficult to move. I remember that a majority of the kids on my bus couldn’t even use the windows. Only the older and stronger kids were ever be able to open them. Even then, sometimes certain windows would be perpetually stuck. Rain is always fun with this sort of thing. Let’s say that all the windows on the bus are down and all the older kids have gotten off on their stops. Do you know what happens to the kids on the bus? They get soaked. No one can close the windows so they all just have to get used to it. This happened to me two or three times growing up and I’m sure that I’m not the only one.

Now that we’ve established that school buses suck on the inside, let’s take a look at how they interact with the outside world. School buses drive slowly. That’s a fact of life. How else could a little kid run after one and actually catch it? They take forever to get up to speed and forever to slow down. They’re hazards!

Now, I’m sure everyone has been on a school bus or behind one when they get to rail road tracks. They stop, open the doors, listen, then go on their merry way. Why? I can understand doing this on tracks that don’t have electronic signs or something like that, but school buses stop at every single set of tracks. Do they have that little faith in technology? I want to know how many school buses have been saved by this method. I would bet $100 it isn’t more than ten. Sure, you don’t want any kids getting hit by a train, but come on. It’s a little over the top.

Finally, we’re at the meat of this problem. Being stuck behind a school bus in traffic. We’ve all been there. It’s usually on one of those busier roads that is still only two lanes that we have the most trouble. You can literally watch as a traffic jam forms. Cars as far as you can see.

I can understand that sometimes you can’t help this, but here’s what’s really B.S. A lot of the time, school buses can prevent these jams. But they don’t. Why? Because they don’t care. I have seen many times this scene: A bus drops some kids off at a house. The bus then drives about ten feet to the next house, stops, and let’s the kids off. WHY COULDN”T THEY LET ALL THE KIDS OFF AT THE SAME STOP??? These kids can’t walk ten feet??? That doesn’t make any sense! Have you ever seen a little kid? They can run a marathon and then play 100 games of tag in a row. They have the energy and the skills to walk to their house. Why drop them off individually when all the houses are right next to each other??? It doesn’t make any sense, and it should be stopped.

And that’s why school buses are B.S.