THE shuttle bus comes once an hour. This morning it is on time.

Diary entry. The shuttle bus came on time. Very, very, happy.

Shuttle buses are a mundane business, but here at the Atlanta Games they are a source of endless fascination and diversion for the masses.

This morning, I'm the only person aboard for the 15 mile journey to the Media Transportation Mall (more accurately known as the Waiting Room). Nothing for it but to make conversation with the elderly driver. "Morning Thomas," she chirps, glancing quickly down at my dangling accreditation cards, and how are you today?"

"You're on time," I say brightly. You are really on time. I'm very, very, happy."

The bus drivers have been having a hard time of it here, and this morning there is news of insurrection in the air. Drivers are guitting in their, well, in their droves, and heading for home and the peaceful life. Wilma, for it is she who is doing the driving, is a native Atlantan and can't understand what all the fussing is about. She has earned $6 an hour since she retired.

"Well Wilma," I say, there are problems. This shuttle that you are now driving for instance, it services just two hotels does it not?"

Yes Thomas," she says.

Well on Tuesday Wilma, the shuttle got lost and dropped me at the wrong hotel."

And so it becomes necessary to unfurl for Wilma the slightly embarrassing story of being dropped off at a Marriot Courtyard Hotel, identical in every architectural respect to the one which we are staying in, having a couple of cool drinks in the bar of this fraudulent hotel, charging those cool drinks to the room and then wandering upstairs to enter the same room only to find that the card key didn't work.

"Yes, yes, Wilma, it was only after some minutes of increasingly embarrassing confusion that I realised that I was in a different hotel. All the damn Georgia countryside looks the same to me Wilma, and the hotel was the same and the folks at the desk announced that they were pleased to see me again as I walked by them. I'm no dope Wilma, this is a story about the shuttles and if you folk down here can't manage to bring us to the right hotels, then you should forget about the Olympics and go back to marrying your siblings." Or words to that effect.

Wilma saw the whole incident as part of the great tapestry of down home charm which Atlanta is weaving with it's homely bungling. Much the way we Irish would view things too. Yet there is no denying that the snags are piling up.

Almost 200 volunteer police have turned in their badges over the last couple of days, fed up with the incompetence and general disorganisation of the Atlantan organising committee.

The volunteers have paid their way to Atlanta themselves (from places as far away as Australia we are told) to be part of the great Olympic family and have been wandering away disillusioned and broke, citing incidents of racism and chaotically bad disorganisation.

The bus drivers haven't fared much better. Having been told that their sub legal minimum wage of $6 an hour would be supplemented by a $3 a day food allowance, they have been bemused to find themselves given packed lunches instead. They are packed in what has been described as a flea ridden, condom littered flop house" not fit to put a journalist in. The drivers have also been making their way home.

Wilma was able to confide that the problems are worse then that.

The 2,000 buses needed to ferry us to the wrong hotels have largely been imported from other states and cities. Almost uniformly, the other states and cities realised that this was their chance to get the bangers and clunkers in the fleets serviced. So smoke belching old buses have been breaking down constantly, shuttles have been late and folk like Wilma have been taking the abuse for $6 an hour and a lunch box.

It's not about money, says another Olympian some minutes after part company with Wilma. We are on the ground floor of the Inforum building in downtown Atlanta and Shaguille O'Neal is telling us about his good fortune in becoming hitched to the LA Lakers for the next seven years for a sum of $ 123 million.

Shag is so rich already that it's probably true that this isn't about money. More likely that he needs to be near Hollywood in order to develop his growing movie career. Anyway this morning we need to be near Shag.

There are so many of us here that the theatre in the Inforum can't take us, neither can the first over spill room. Hacks pile into a second overspill room and stare up at a big screen of Shag and his rich Olympic buddies.

Shag, however, who is 9ft 9in, can pull the bends out of windy roads with his bare hands and drinks Pepsi by the lake load, doesn't want to talk about money, he'll be having another press conference later to talk about the money. For now he wants to talk about the Olympics. We lose interest quickly. Who wants to talk about the Olympics?

As we leave, a Danish journalist has just asked why it is that basketball players get two points when they score, as if the only way to find out the answer to that mystery was to ask a millionaire at a crowded press conference. Many oaths are offered.