When some individuals who wished to travel to Bolgatanga went to the O.A Travel and Tours terminus in Sunyani to make advance ticket booking for 31 May 2023, a fat and friendly official in charge of booking told them the bus would depart at a strict 6:30 am.
And for the avoidance of doubt, she also penned the given time behind the tickets, writing the reporting time first— 5:30 am.
Her emphasis on the departure time could be felt by the strength with which she wrote it on the tickets.
And as she pushed the pen across the plain flipsides of the tickets, the excess flesh on her right arm shook heavily along— seemingly communicating that habitual latecomers would feel the same heavy shake when they missed an O.A bus for the first time.
The road trip from Sunyani to Bolgatanga was expected to take a usual nine hours.
But it took almost an extra one hour in the end. It was no passenger’s fault.
Perhaps, it was the transport company’s fault. The passengers reported punctually at the terminus. But after entering the bus with their tickets, which bore their seat numbers, they agonisingly spent much time struggling to locate their exact seats.
There were seat number tags on the overhead compartments of the bus. But the tags did not precisely match the rows where the seats were positioned.
It took the intervention of a terminus assistant, who carried out a partial ‘reshuffle’ on the ready bus, for the passengers to find their rightful seats.
The bus, partly as a result of the mix-up, ended up departing at 7:10 am— to the visible displeasure of the passengers who did not disappoint the ticket reservation clerk.
Watch below a video of the pre-departure struggle that resulted in the passengers’ time being wasted on a road journey from Brong Ahafo Region to Upper East Region:
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org
