It should have been a straightforward training exercise, but for Ella it became the beginning of a strange and unsettling experience. On 9 July, a group of new employees with Haggis Waggon Tours gathered in Paisley, ready to learn the ropes from Darryl Smith, the man behind the company. They had been invited to walk around the town, an activity designed to familiarise them with the routes that tourists would eventually take. For Ella, the invitation felt like the start of something better. She had always been drawn to the idea of a job that was not just work but a form of storytelling—old streets, hidden corners, characters from the past, and the kind of anecdotes that could make a city feel alive. The company’s brand, with its playful name and promise of adventure, seemed to fit that dream. Then Darryl said he had brought a bus. The group looked around, expecting to see a brightly coloured coach waiting for them. There was no bus. Ella scanned the street, checking every corner, every lay-by, every possible place where a large vehicle could be parked. Nothing. That was the moment, she later said, when something “felt off.” She tried to rationalise it. Perhaps the bus was running late. Perhaps it had been moved to another pick-up point. Perhaps she had misunderstood what Darryl meant. But the feeling would not disappear. The rest of the walk should have been an ordinary introduction to Paisley, yet she could not shake the awareness that they were walking because, for some reason, the promised vehicle had never arrived. It was the kind of small, awkward detail that could be explained away, but it stayed with her like a splinter. Looking back, she could see that the red flags were not hidden. They were just mixed into the excitement of a new opportunity, and she had no practice at telling the difference between a bumpy start and a trap. She would replay that first morning many times afterwards, wondering whether she should have turned back then, and why it can be so hard to walk away from something you want to be true.
Eventually, the training exercise brought the group to a stop outside what Darryl described as Haggis Waggon Tours’ head office on Paisley High Street. Ella had expected something functional—a front desk, a stack of flyers, maybe a logo on the window. Instead, the building was vacant and locked. It looked as though it had been empty for a long time, with no sign of life behind the glass and no indication that a tour company operated from within. What made this even more confusing was that the same address was listed on the Haggis Waggon Tours website under the “contact us” section. It seemed too deliberate to be a coincidence. Later, the BBC contacted the landlord of the building, and the landlord confirmed that Darryl Smith did not hold a lease there. The online contact address has since been changed to read “Edinburgh.” Darryl Smith explained that he had built the website himself and that mentioning the Paisley address was a mistake. He said the spot had only ever been used as a meeting point for tours leaving from Paisley, not as an actual office. For Ella, this explanation did not really answer the question. A meeting point did not need to be listed as a head office. A new business could make errors, but this was not a typo in a brochure; it was a fundamental mismatch between what the company appeared to be and what it actually was. She began to wonder what else might be different in person. At the time, though, she chose to smile and nod. She was one of the new employees. She did not want to be the one who questioned the boss on the first day, the one who caused trouble before proving herself. So she pushed the doubts down and kept walking, even as the building grew smaller behind them. She later realised that the first days of a new job should make a person feel more grounded, not less. Instead, she was moving in the opposite direction, standing in front of a locked door and being asked to accept that it was an office.
Despite these red flags, Ella decided to give Darryl Smith the benefit of the doubt. She wanted to be fair. She knew that starting a company was difficult, that websites were often rushed, and that people made mistakes. Besides, the chance to shadow a Harry Potter themed tour was not something she wanted to give up lightly. The job had an element of whimsy to it, the kind of work that sounded more like fun than labour. So on 13 July, she agreed to be picked up in Paisley at 8am, along with three others. She arrived early, perhaps because she wanted to prove that she was reliable, perhaps because a part of her was still hopeful that the bus would appear. The morning was quiet. The street was not crowded. She stood at the meeting point and watched the light change over the town, waiting for the sound of an engine or the sight of a large vehicle rounding the corner. None came. Eight o’clock passed, then half past, then the rest of the morning. Four hours went by without a single coach appearing. Eventually, Darryl got back to them. He said there had been a mix-up, and he claimed that he was dealing with domestic issues. The explanation was vague and personal, difficult to challenge without sounding cold or unsympathetic. Ella wanted to believe him. She told herself that everyone has bad days, and that a single missed pickup did not mean the whole business was a sham. But she could not ignore the accumulating evidence that something was wrong. The group stood together, not quite sure what to say, each of them silently wondering whether they had been fooled. The longer they waited, the more they understood that they were not waiting for a late bus; they were waiting for an explanation that would never satisfy. It was not the worst job experience in the world, she told herself. People miss buses. Companies make mistakes. But there was something about the way the excuses kept changing, and the way no evidence ever arrived, that made her stomach tighten.
The evidence had been mounting since the very first day. There was no visible bus in Paisley. The head office was an empty, locked building. The landlord said no lease existed. The website had been altered to remove the address. And then there were the pictures. At some point, Ella and the others began to study the images on the company’s social media and website more closely. Something about the buses looked off—too clean, too perfect, too rendered. When they raised the concern, Darryl admitted that the images were not photographs. They had been generated by artificial intelligence. He said that the company was new and that the real buses had not yet been wrapped in the Haggis Waggon design. That, he claimed, was why the marketing materials showed fictional coaches rather than the actual fleet. To Ella, this was a turning point. It meant that everything they had seen of the company’s operations could be manufactured. A website could be built. A head office could be listed. A bus could be created with a few keystrokes. But none of that made a real business. She later reflected on the situation with a bluntness born of frustration: “I think to this day none of us have actually seen the buses. They don’t exist, do they?” It was a rhetorical question, but it was also a confession. She had been waiting for a bus that might never have existed in the first place. With every excuse, the gap between the company’s image and its reality grew wider. She had wanted to believe that the AI images were a stylistic choice, but they were not. They were a disguise, and once she saw through them, she could not unsee them. She began to wonder whether she had ever had a job at all, or whether she had been invited to play a part in someone else’s fantasy. The thought made her feel foolish, but also angry. She had shown up, and she deserved a straight answer.
Darryl Smith has consistently pushed back against the suggestion that the company is not real. He has said that the coaches do, in fact, exist, and that the AI-generated images were only temporary placeholders. The company is relatively new, he explained, and the process of wrapping the buses with the Haggis Waggon design is still underway. He also repeated his earlier claim that the Paisley address was a mistake, a detail included on a website he built himself before the business had settled on a meeting point. In his account, the story is not about deception; it is about a small start-up struggling to get off the ground. But for Ella, the distinction between a struggling start-up and an illusion was no longer clear. Real businesses may have delays, but they usually have something to show for themselves. They have an office with a lease. They have vehicles that can be seen and touched. They have employees who have actually worked a shift or driven a route. None of those things had materialised. The more Darryl explained, the more distant the company became. The excuses might have been true, but they required a level of faith that Ella no longer had. She had given her time, her patience, and her willingness to believe, and in return she had been left standing on a street corner for four hours, staring at the spot where a bus should have been. If the buses did exist, she thought, where were they? If there were tours, who had taken them? She had not found a single passenger, a single photograph, a single trace of the operation moving through the world. Darryl Smith’s response to the BBC was clear on one point: the company’s image, at least for now, was being assembled from the same tools that anyone could use to invent a business from nothing. Whether he intended it or not, that was the impression he left.
This story is not just about missing buses and misleading websites. It is about the people who show up. Ella was ready to work. She had energy, curiosity, and the kind of optimism that employers dream of finding. She did not demand perfection; she simply wanted a chance. But that chance was tangled up in a series of false starts and half-truths, and by the time it was over, she had learned a harsh lesson about trust. The experience left her with a sharper eye for the warning signs she had once been willing to ignore. There is a broader takeaway too. In an era where anyone can build a polished website, where images can be generated from nothing, and where logos can be created without an office behind them, it is easy to mistake appearance for reality. A contact address is not proof of a business. A meeting point is not a head office. A picture of a bus is not a bus. And a person who claims to be your employer is not necessarily a person who can offer you a future. For Ella, the red flags were visible from the beginning—on a quiet street in Paisley, outside a locked door, beside an empty stretch of road. The hardest part was learning to trust them. In the end, no one was hurt, and no one was stranded forever. But the memory of that morning, and the bus that never came, will probably stay with her for a long time. She does not want to become cynical, but she knows now that hope is not enough. The next time she sees a job listing that looks too good to be true, she will ask harder questions before she boards the first bus. For every person like Ella, there are probably many others who quietly walk away from strange situations without ever telling their stories. They do not make headlines because nothing tragic happened. But their trust has been worn down, and that matters.