The bus wasn't coming.
The time I got mugged, I think?
tl;dr: I once had an unpleasant experience at a bus stop, and I shouldn’t have even been waiting there.
This is a true story that I haven’t really shared publicly before, but I think it’s an important one to tell and implicitly ties in with the theme of the blog. (Hopefully my mum doesn’t read this or she’ll insist I move back up north to Hartlepool.)
In July 2022, after a Thursday at uni working on my final project report, I headed to Stratford to have dinner with friends. It was a warm summer’s evening - the time of year where London gets really unpleasant, sticky, and overbearing, and supermarket fridges all stop working - and we ended up sitting outside until quite late. I left at around half ten, having kept an eye on CityMapper on my phone to see when the next 97 would be arriving at the bus stop about 100 metres away, which was just out of sight around a corner.
As it starts not very far away, and is quite a tediously long route, 97s arrive randomly and after drivers layover for a while, start tracking at the last minute without seeming to run to any sort of schedule. When it had shown as two minutes away, I’d headed over to the bus stop.
What happened next wasn’t great.
The bus stop.
This particular bus stop is on a not-all-that-quiet road running through the former Olympic Village, is served by two bus routes, and gets passed by various coach routes including two running out to Stansted Airport. It’s in an area I was (and am) very familiar with - I lived there for four years and have been in the area on a regular basis ever since. As is part and parcel of being around the Olympic Park, there was construction going on right behind the bus stop, which meant there was a large hoarding running along the side of the pavement, and street lighting around the stop was out in a few places, but that was fairly normal. Nothing in particular about going to or waiting at this bus stop felt unsafe or out of the ordinary.
The bus stop itself is just down from a set of traffic lights, and has a lit shelter, of which one end is made up by a big ad panel that’s also illuminated. There’s no Countdown screen. While there is a pole with ‘bus stop’ flag sign and timetables, for whatever reason it’s situated sort of upstream of the shelter, meaning when you’re in it, the sign is behind the ad panel and not visible.
I arrived with a limp - I can’t remember why exactly but it was probably something I’d injured in the gym - and was carrying my gym bag over my shoulder, with backpack straps over that. I took a photo of the impressive amount of graffiti that was on the shelter wall, sending it to other friends in a group chat accompanied by a suitably me comment, and then proceeded to wait for the bus.
I looked down at my phone to check it was still live tracking (it was) and then pottered around in the general area of the bus stop. After a minute or so, a guy appeared out of nowhere on the bench in the bus shelter. Now, in hindsight, the fact that he was wearing like… a ski mask should have been a sign of where this was going, but this is London, and Covid had just been a thing, and people are weird, and just… live and let live, you know? I wanted to get home, and he was probably also waiting for the 97 - that route attracts all sorts.
When the bus didn’t arrive as expected, I walked around the back of the ad board to where the timetables were, and noticed there was a diversion card for the 97 and N205 in the holder. It had no dates on it, which I feel like it was supposed to, and was only part filled out by hand, but anyway, the bus was still showing as live tracking and due to arrive any minute.
While I was looking at this, the guy on the bench had got up and come around the back of the shelter towards me but I had conveniently sort of passed around from the other side and missed him. He asked me if the bus was coming - to which I said “I think so - the thing says it might be on diversion but the app says it’s coming in like two minutes?” or something to that effect.
After another minute or so, I looked down at my phone again to see the tracking, and the bus was more or less due. What happens next is a bit of a blur (but also in parts quite vivid).
The next thing I know, the guy is behind me and to the side, and has firm hold of my gym bag strap at the back, with his other hand in his pocket. He’s much taller than me, although probably younger. He tells me not to shout or make a scene or I’ll be stabbed, which was admittedly very to the point. I don’t see the knife - but honestly given the circumstances it didn’t seem entirely far-fetched that he had one.
He asks what phone I had, and on answering him he snarked “that’ll do”. Oh dear. This was, annoyingly, the only time in my life that I have ever had an iPhone that was even maybe two generations behind the current model, because I have better things to spend money on (and will only break it anyway.)
You might think that he would have just taken it and made off, but no - he then took the time to pressure me into removing my iCloud account and resetting the phone - a process he dictated from memory.
Part way through, he clocked two people walking along the street in our direction, and ordered me not to look up from the phone and instead to pretend I was giving directions if they happened to ask. Despite willing with every fibre of my being that they’d somehow notice what was happening and rescue me from that awful situation, they continued past without batting an eyelid.
The whole thing went on for what felt like an eternity.
And then, once that was that, he told me to walk away, and he disappeared.
-
This incident has always bugged me for several reasons. He might not have had a knife, but I mean I wasn’t about to ask to see it, was I? I don’t think being a cocky shit and demanding he “prove it” before complying would have helped matters, all considered.
While I’m usually the type to argue back and stand my ground in difficult situations, fortunately for once I seemed to actually realise that the best strategy was “just do what he wants”. After all, if I did get stabbed in London and still lived to tell the tale, mum would never let me live it down with “I told you so!”s for the rest of my days.
Because he had hold of my gym bag strap, which was trapped under my backpack straps, I had no way of getting away cleanly - I couldn’t drop either bag and leave them behind. And even then, I couldn’t have realistically ran - I was limping, as I mentioned. And all this was happening just around a corner from where I could’ve been visible and in earshot of my friends who remained outside.
But what annoyed me the most was what I pieced together after.
The whole time this was happening - as I said, this took place over the course of at least five minutes (probably more) - I was looking up at every car, van, lorry and coach driving past in desperation. From the road, they could just see two people very close together as a dark silhouette in front of the brightly lit ad board behind us. I distinctly remember looking frantically for the bus, which was still coming. I don’t know if I stalled by not getting my password right, or if maybe that was just me fumbling things in a difficult situation. But the bus was going to come and save me from this situation. The bus would come and it would all be alright.
But the bus didn’t come.
It turns out that the bus wasn’t coming.
I don’t really care about the phone. And in many ways, it couldn’t have gone better than it did. I left with my health, physically at least, unharmed. I just had to get a new phone and replacement SIM card the next day. Maybe I shouldn’t have been even taking it out of my pocket to check when the bus was supposed to arrive, but this is an area that I knew well, that had literally been home at one point, and I felt safe there.
Even then - the only reason that I was there at that bus stop, the reason I was sure that bus was coming, the reason I kept looking down the street into the approaching headlights throughout all of it hoping to see my saviour in the form of the 97 - was because CityMapper told me the bus was coming, and its arrival time was live.
This wasn’t CityMapper’s fault - it gets its data from TfL’s APIs which provide all manner of information about anything and everything they run across London. It presents this information as truth. Maybe I was a fool for trusting the app?
-
On this occasion, despite someone having gone out and physically placed the (vague, incomplete and undated) diversion cards into timetable holders, and bus drivers having been informed of the diversion being in place, and presumably even diversion directional signage being installed for them to follow, nobody bothered to update the system to mark that route as on diversion or those bus stops as not being served by it.
Had they have done so, the 97 wouldn’t have even shown for that stop, let alone as live, tracking, and about to arrive.
I wouldn’t have been there, and throughout the entire ordeal, wouldn’t have been looking up, desperate for the bus to come. Did the guy know that the bus wasn’t coming, and that’s why he knew he had enough time to go through the frankly audacious steps of making me remove my iCloud and reset the phone? Who could say? Maybe I was an easy target and he knew it.
-
Once he was gone, I stumbled back around the corner to where one friend was still sat outside enjoying the late-evening warmth. I think my first words were a shaken “I think I just got mugged?” and he at first assumed I was joking. (I’m honestly not sure if this qualifies as a mugging, given it wasn’t exactly violent, but it was certainly a robbery at least.)
I tried to call the police to report it, but there was some sort of technical problem with the non-emergency number, and so I ended up just making a crime report online. (In their defence, an officer did come out to my home a few days later to take a statement and was very nice, and spoke of what he’d witnessed firsthand of what happens when these things go differently, which was quite reassuring as to how I’d handled things.) I also tried to call Three (my mobile network) to block my SIM but after navigating through menu trees and listening to several pre-recorded messages, the line just went dead.
After maybe an hour and a half processing what just happened, including taking a walk to the bus stop and back, and with the last bus toward my flat having long since departed (from some stop other than the one I’d earlier been waiting at), my friend booked me an Uber home. I distinctly remember when I got out of the car at the other end, the driver reminded me to make sure I didn’t leave my phone behind. Sigh.
-
I won’t say that this incident didn’t affect me. It did, particularly in the short term.
I became hyper aware of people around me, particularly at night, and put a lot of extra thought into going outside when it was dark. I became suspicious of anyone who even vaguely resembled the guy involved, which given I only saw his eyes and his hand and therefore didn’t really have much to go on, was a lot of people. I was also deeply frustrated and spent a lot of time recounting what had happened, what was said, thinking about what I could have done differently, and perhaps even felt a little ashamed?
I’m fortunate that I was able to access counselling through my University, and as a result there weren’t any major long lasting effects from what happened (this was water off a duck’s back as far as my mental health is concerned). In many ways, I got off very lightly.
To this day, I’m a lot more alert as to who is around me if I find myself waiting for a bus at night, and make a point to stay somewhere away from the shelter itself, and to avoid using my phone unless absolutely necessary. I also think twice about putting bags over my shoulders in ways that could be used to physically restrain me, which isn’t even something most people would ever consider.
-
The next day I tweeted TfL telling them that the bus stop was still showing as being served by the 97 on their website (and data feeds), and what had happened to me as a result. I never got a response, but the data for the stop and route was silently corrected within an hour.
I should not have been at that bus stop in the first place.
Because the bus wasn’t coming.
Image disclaimer:
I destroyed several rainforests by generating two images for this post that probably plagiarised the graphite-pencil work of artists far more talented than I could ever hope to be (they’re based on my own photos, though). I’d hope you agree that they add enough to the post to colour how horrible an experience this was that doing so deserves a pass, just this once.
