Ignorance is bliss.
That is how the famous saying goes anyway.
But is that really true?
For one poor woman who took to TikTok to rant about her ignorance of local bus customs, it seems like ignorance actually caused her a fair bit of angst (spoiler: she missed her bus).
Here is what happened.
Woman Was Not Aware of Local Bus Custom to Flag Bus Down
About a week ago, a woman made a post on TikTok about how she was “so done with sg bus culture”. The abbreviation “sg” is short for “Singapore”.
In the video, user @abercado rants about how she was standing at a bus stop near the road waiting for bus number 2, but it just drove past her when it arrived.
She had waited for the bus for nine minutes.
That’s quite a long time to wait for a bus. We would have been mad too. But alas, was this a case where the bus driver failed to notice a potential passenger?
It seems that the bus driver may not even have been aware of the woman’s desire to board the bus.
According to the woman’s TikTok video, she did not put out her hand to flag the bus. She merely stood near the edge of the road and was using eye power to send a telepathic message to the bus driver to stop the bus.
It seems ludicrous, but the woman’s reason for not flagging the bus was that she was not aware of the local bus culture. In fact, the whole point of her making the TikTok post was to ask her followers if she was in the wrong for not flagging down the bus.
Is her claim about not knowing the local bus culture true, though? If she were unaware of the need to flag down the bus, she probably would not have mentioned putting out her arm at all.
Given that her TikTok video revolved around the idea of whether flagging the bus down was a prerequisite for the bus to stop at the bus stop, it seems that she was already aware of the need to flag down the bus with an arm but did not want to do so.
The woman, who was visibly worked up, ends her rant by saying that she “hates” to take the bus and prefers using the MRT to get around.
For those kind souls who are worried about whether the woman got to her destination in the end, the answer is “yes”.
The same woman later posted another TikTok video showing the bus arriving at the bus stop, with the woman very obviously flagging the bus down.
The caption on the screen said that she was flagging the bus down “just in case”.
This time, the bus stopped for her to board. She then filmed herself giving the camera a thumbs up from inside the bus, saying that it was a “success”. Good for her.
Netizens Told Woman She Needed to Flag Down the Bus
In response to the woman’s TikTok rant, netizens were swift to shut down her attempts to argue that the bus driver was at fault for not stopping when she did not flag down the bus.
One of the comments was from the TikTok user @YourBusCaptain, who clarified once and for all that bus captains do not stop if they are not flagged down by passengers. This user appears to have good authority to make such a claim, as his profile seems to suggest that he actually works as a bus captain.
Other comments were more direct in their criticism of the woman. One of the comments insinuated that the woman did not have the basic knowledge a kindergartener would have because flagging down a bus was something taught to children of that level.
Yet other Singaporeans were just direct in telling the woman that she was in the wrong. They educated the woman about the need to flag the bus down. In response to these comments, the woman who posted the video replied, saying that she now knows about this local practice of flagging down buses.
The original poster also seems to have quite a sense of humour.
She followed up the first two TikTok videos about flagging down the bus with another video related to this topic.
In the third video, she superimposed the comment from the real-life bus driver @YourBusCaptain on Tiktok on her own video and said that the whole of TikTok was “telling her to wave”. The comment superimposed on the video said, “[no] wave no stop”.
The woman responded to these calls quite literally as she then waved to the camera. For some reason, she also seemed to have damp hair in this third TikTok video.
One can’t help but wonder if this surprising appearance was due to the cold sweat of realising that we in Singapore flag down our buses when we want to board the bus.