Triple happiness

Being capable of locating bus stations in NY is quite an accomplishment, especially given the fact that private carriers may provide wrong directions at their own websites. It took some time and some strolling in the burning sun to find the place where we could board a bus headed for Wilmington. As soon as we managed to find the strip of the street (to call it a station would be an overstatement) where the bus was about to stop and pick up some passengers, we were approached by a Vietnamese woman (all right, she might have been Korean or Cambodian; but we don't care, now do we?) claiming to be a ticket seller. Searching for any sort of an office proved futile. She was sitting on the sidewalk, in front of a long-closed hotel whose front door was barred with planks. The name of the coach company was Double Happyness (yes, they really spelled it HappYness) and she struck us as a self-proclaimed representative of the firm. I guess you could call her 'Key Account Manager.' We were reluctant to give her any money cause she had no document confirming her affiliations with the company. We explained that poor and disorientated tourists from Poland, who had seen big cities like NY only on black&white TV, need to be bamboozlement-conscious. Our decision was to wait for the bus to come and ask the driver whether the lady was selling legitimate tickets. You would understand our suspicion if you had seen that woman (who looked like a crossbreed of a beggar and a street market vendor) and the tickets, full of enigmatic Asian signs and looking as if they had been printed with the cheapest device available on the market. Our lack of trust was like a slap in her face. She seemed seriously insulted while saying in her moo-shu-pork accent: 'I work here 10 years.' So why the heck does your English still suck? When the bus finally arrived, it turned out that our beggar was indeed a worker of Double HappYness. She felt so offended that she didn't want to sell us the tickets. Apparently, her English is not the only thing that sucks. The company needs to consider organizing a customer service workshop for its employees. In the end, though, we hopped on the bus and arrived in Wilmington some time later. It was triple happYness.