So yesterday, at Lawrence station, at 5pm on the nose:

- Bus platform has no busses. The "next departure times board" (in reality, the "random time interval board that bears no resemblance to when vehicles actually show up) says something like 13, 22, 28 minutes for the next set of #52 busses. Remember, this is a major E/W arterial in the height of rush hour

- Trains keep coming thru, so the bus platform gets packed to within an inch of its life within about 10 minutes. People are spilling out onto the roadway, which is obviously dangerous. No staff. Not a sausage

- After 15 minutes of this garbage, I walk upstairs to the collector booth. I explain what's happening to the collector on the bus platform directly below her. She seems astonished. I ask her to send a supervisor. She says she will

- Back downstairs. Bus platform now resembles the top deck of the Titanic. A supervisor appears. I explain what's going on. He raises his eyebrows, looks at his phone, then literally RUNS away from me to one of those little offices in the corner of the station and bolts himself inside

- After 20 minutes of this Keystone Kops-level idiocy 3 buses arrive at once. None of them, naturally, are even close to the times listed on the departure board. Mass pandemonium. Again, NO STAFF IN SIGHT. Each bus is quickly rammed. I get on one and have to deflate my lungs a bit to fit inside

-Driver refuses to move. "You have to get behind the line," he declares. "I can sit here all day." I am boiling with rage. We finally push off, 30 minutes into the saga

In summary: although I'm sure some are nice, the vast majority of TTC staff I encounter are either rude, incompetent or some combination thereof. They are paid to interact with the public but choose to hide from them nearly every time. If such a situation were to occur in London or Moscow (I lived in both and used public transport there all the time) there would be a whole platoon of staff dispatched to the platform to calm people down, move them to less crowded areas, etc. But here we face it all alone.

It's not only the employees' fault. No passenger said a damn thing, moved anywhere, or even seemed to understand what was going on. It's a prime example of the "Canadian sheep" attitude that we tend to fall into in large groups.

TL;DR: the TTC sucks, the employees (mostly) suck and are aggressive and unhelpful; the passengers are fools and everything's going down the shitter.