Get the Hell off the Bus!

William Michaelis

Description

The About the Book information is not available as of this time.

Sujets

• Bus
• Leader
• Tour
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 30 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669857976
• Langue: English

Extrait

Get the Hell Off the Bus!
Bus! The Warped, Wild, and Wicked Life of a Tour Leader!
William Michaelis

Copyright © 2023 by William Michaelis.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022922762
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-5799-0

Softcover
978-1-6698-5798-3

eBook
978-1-6698-5797-6
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 12/29/2022
 
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
849173
CONTENTS
Why Would ANYONE do this Job?
Part 1: I Could Kill These People and Not Give a Flicker of Emotion About It!
The Water in the Toilet isn’t Warm!
One-Thousand Euro Taxis and Idiots Who Hire Them
The Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse
What if He Vomits in the Dead Sea?
I’m a Tour Leader Not a Babysitter
How Do You Commit a Person to a Mental Asylum in Amsterdam?
Happy New Year, Now Get the Hell Off the Bus!
Part 2: Can I Have this Person on Every Tour? I’ll Pay for it!
Just What in the Hell Kind of Lettuce is This?
Why Do You Have Cheese in Your Underpants?
Barry! You Talk Barry!
Will, That’s Captain’s Orders!
James the Giant Peach
The Frogman
“It’s Your Body Rejecting the Engagement!”
Part 3: Did That Actually Just Happen?
How Dare They Do This to an Australian! And a Canadian!
I Hope We Made Things Not So Difficult for You!
“Venice Fell on the Tourists”
This Restaurant Has No Food Today
How Hard is it to Use a Toilet!?
How Exactly Do You Expense a Bribe?
He’s Probably Out Back Having Sex
I Can Just Steal Whatever I Can Shove into My Cargo Shorts?
Part 4: A Random Assortment of the Weird
Those Are the House Rules
Hotel Name Withheld for Legal Reasons
Get Asquinted with the Plan
The Vegetarian Quarantine Corner
Is that the Real Eiffel Tower?!
The Quiz
The Quiz - Answers
Part 5: To Mother Russia, with Love
How to Enter Russia Correctly
Get in My Van…You’ll Like It!
Sometimes Foreigners Must Learn Russian Ways!
It’s Like Being in the Bourne Identity!
 
Acknowledgements
 
To all my passengers, with the hope of many more adventures and stories to come!
Why Would ANYONE do this Job?
When you’re growing up as a child, you dream of being many different things. At some point everyone is asked the inevitable question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The obvious answers for most little boys are obvious; race-car driver, fireman, train engineer, astronaut, dinosaur hunter (that one died a swift death). The one job I don’t think any little boy or girl has ever claimed they want to do is that of Tour Leader.
It’s a strange job. It’s a unique job. And despite what it looks like, it’s a tough job. But is it ever a lot of fun! It’s a job for those of us who never truly grew up.
Think about it for just a moment. Take fifty strangers from varying countries, cultural backgrounds, ages, professions, religions, and countless other metrics; cram the whole lot of them on a tour bus in a strange place none of them have ever been before (Hey, it’s not Des Moines, Iowa!) for anywhere from one week to one month, and put them under the direction and leadership of a lad who struggled to gain admittance to a second-rate Canadian community college as a young adult and see what happens. If this seems like a recipe for disaster, you’re right.
Tour Leaders are very much a blessed group of people. We get to have fun for a living. We get to travel for a living. Staying in a different hotel every single night and dealing with fifty passengers all with differing needs, thoughts, views, and expectations might seem like a living hell for most people, but for a Tour Leader it’s what we live for. You never know what will happen next! You wake up in the morning knowing that there’s a decent chance that something unbelievable and shocking is just around the next corner. Is this the day that I’m going to walk in on a border guard who’s decided that his primal urge to procreate is more important than stamping fifty foreigners’ passports? Am I, at some point in the next couple of hours, going to witness my local tour guide attempt to kill a rival group’s local tour guide? What are the odds that before the day is out the local mafia is going to steal my cash card and leave me penniless? Is it entirely in the realm of possibility that one of the passengers will do something so irretrievably stupid and insane that it will serve as a cautionary tale that I tell future generations? Believe it or not, the answer to each one of those questions is a resounding yes.
The life of a Tour Leader is full of some of the most shocking, crazy, and unbelievable stories that you’ll ever hear. We get to experience it all; action, adventure, horror, elation, fright, bemusement, romance, you name it! With one exception, boredom. The life of a Tour Leader is many things, but it’s never, ever boring. Not even for one minute!
So, sit back, relax, pour yourself a stiff drink if you need one (several stories require it) and take in some of the more memorable incidents that have come my way during my career as a Tour Leader. And, no doubt, as you work your way through this volume you’ll ask yourself the inevitable question, “Why the f%&# would anybody ever want to be a Tour Leader?” I’ll supply the answer right now:
BECAUSE IT BEATS THE HELL OUT OF AN OFFICE JOB!
Part 1
I Could Kill These People and Not Give a Flicker of Emotion About It!
Perhaps the most intriguing part of being a tour leader isn’t the places you get to travel to, the things you see, or even the experiences that you have. I always found the passengers, who you get to meet and lead around to be the most compelling part of the job. Every tour presented a new, interesting, and diverse set of people all united together for the same goal; to have a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Although, oftentimes it seemed that some passengers were far more interested in achieving a more different objective instead, TREADING ON MY LAST NERVE! I’m not merely talking about little bugaboos such as being five minutes late getting back to the coach, or deciding two minutes before a roast pork dinner that they’ve decided to be a lactose-intolerant vegan on this particular day. No-no; what follows are some of the most brutal passenger stories. Stories that could drive even the most patient tour leader to happily push certain passenger malcontents into an oncoming Paris Metro train!*
*Not that I ever actually did that. Forget I mentioned it, I’ve said too much already.
The Water in the Toilet isn’t Warm!
It always seemed that the longer the tour, the more likely the odds are that you’d get a truly horrible passenger. Given that the longest itinerary I ran was twenty-six days, this could make for some challenging times if you got a rotten apple. There’s no worse feeling than meeting a truly miserable piece of human flotsam, knowing that you’ll be with them day-in and day-out for nearly a month. You know that it’s going to be a constant strain to cater to their whims, deal with their constant moods, do it with a smile on your face, all the while being fully aware that the useless flesh-lump is only going to tip you five Euros at the end of the tour. Neil from Singapore instantly fit this bill.
Neil from Singapore was certainly sent from one of Hell’s outer circles to make my life, and that of every hotelier he met, miserable. Nothing in his room could ever satisfy him. The man could have been staying in an executive suite in a Four Seasons and he’d still find an issue with it! Generally, his complaints were of such a ridiculous nature that if one didn’t know better, you’d think he was just having a laugh. Below is just a small list of things in hotels that he complained about, and the response I would counter with:
“The room doesn’t have an ice bucket” – No worries there, Neil; they don’t have an ice machine either.
“The bedside table is almost broken” – That’s fine; I’ll make sure it almost gets fixed.
“The room doesn’t have a city view” – Neil, the hotel is only two stories tall. None of the rooms have a city view.
“The television doesn’t have any Asian channels” – Good reason for that Neil. There’s no Asian channels because this hotel is actually situated in Europe.
It just went on and on, every hotel, for twenty-six days. The man must have, immediately upon entering a room, searched for something to whine about because he’d come back to the lobby to complain about things before I’d had a chance to get to my room. By the time we got to Switzerland, and after three weeks, I’d about had it with him. Luckily, we were staying at the hotel run by a very straight-laced Swiss-German hotelier named Ulrich, who will be covered in detail himself