Keep Your Bus Tickets

Keep your bus tickets. They can one day save your ass. I know. It saved mine.

I was a frequent commuter of the Nagoya-Balibago W.Y.S.W.Y.G. bus route when I was still living in my dad�s house in ****. Every weekend, I would empty out jeans pockets and secret compartments in my bag for the accumulated used bus tickets of the week.

Back then, I did this routine as a way of expressing my individuality. Kids have ways of expressing themselves in outlets like sports, art, literature, and music, and being in my early adult years during those times, I let out my repressed emotions by wall papering one side of my room with used bus tickets.

I made the placement as organized as I was able to. Tickets were sorted according to their size, color, value, bus operator, bus number, and ticket number.

Tickets were glued neatly on the wall. Even those which the bus conductor had excessively torn off as proof that it had passed his inspection were displayed as if they had been pasted there whole.

As I moved out of the house, I took the habit with me. While I was still considerate enough not to ruin the walls of the house I rented, I kept my bus tickets inside a water- and fire-proof case. They were sorted as I had posted on my bedroom wall the ones before them, and were arranged in their case in a manner in which, if one day I had me enough funds to have a place of my own, I could just walk in, open the case, and glue the tickets to any portion of the house I choose, tickets at the top of the stacks first, stacks from left to right and top to bottom of the case.

By the time I got involved in a legal mess that could have sent me to live the remaining years of my life in prison (and discontinue my bus ticket collection!), I was 0.0010 percent into being able to afford a place of my own. I was at the time a bed spacer in a semi-tranquil residence on the outskirts of the Money District. It happened that something horrible (I�m not allowed to say exactly what) was consciously done to one of the neighbors, and some two witnesses claimed that they saw me do it.

That was a lie.

But the police arrested me anyway, and they were all ready to figuratively hang me, with all the media and stuff, and my trial was on TV four nights a week almost like the Erap impeachment trial.

And the judge was about to condemn me when my very intelligent lawyer (I�m also not allowed to mention his name) saw me straightening a fresh bus ticket out of my jeans pocket because I was bored. An idea occurred to him and the very next day, we brought to court with us the bus tickets I had collected the day the horrible wrongdoing had been performed on my neighbor, and people from the bus company from which I had bought them.

One of the bus company people was the ticket inspector. Her job is to periodically get in buses while on the road and inspect the bus tickets sold to the passengers. The range of ticket numbers sold at a particular time of the day per bus is written on a list she carries around with her. This is to prevent drivers and conductors from cheating the bus company by not issuing tickets to paying passengers, so they can tell the operator only this amount of tickets are sold, and the unaccounted fare collection they can keep for themselves.

The ticket inspector produced for the court her list of bus tickets sold on the day of the inhumane act on my neighbor. It showed that at around the time the unfriendly act was supposed to be taking place, I was on a bus, riding on a route either terminal of which was about 80 kilometers from the Money District.

Everyone was stunned by the brilliance of it. I was acquitted almost immediately, while my very intelligent lawyer moved up to Hot Shot Lawyer status in less than twenty-four hours.

See? If I were you, I�d start my own bus ticket collection too.

� Jay Santos 2004.