Asleep on a Train

Well now, I'm getting ready to head off to work (it's been a long time since I could say that with confidence) and today is the 5th day of 'training' for me. I lucked out with the driver/trainer assigned to me. He is an older guy called Brian (Brian told me! ) and he is an everlasting font of information regarding life, the universe and driving buses. In the past three days, I've managed to learn several main bus routes, gained a good understanding of the main parts of using the ticketing machine, seen how to handle a crisis such as running late on a bus route and missing out on a tea break, and I've also managed to start driving the routes. The driving parts is where I'm going to concentrate on for the next few days as I master keeping a good working speed, quickly stopping the bus, loading the bus with passengers (tickets, money, directions etc) and getting around the vast amount of roundabouts, 'go slow chicanes' and speed humps that we need t...

After many long hours of trials and tribulations, I'm please to announce that I'm now a Bus Driver, albeit a trainee one. Today was my first day "on the buses"! I spent most of it being trained in all matters bus like by Peter, and, learning alongside Matt, we learned about driver safety, passenger safety, cash handling and customer relations. Tomorrow I've been assigned a driver to train me on the road. I will be starting a shift at 6am and spend the full day driving throughout the district, finishing up at 8pm. Over the past week or two since I last wrote, I was sweating on my results of the ECG Stress test. I passed ok and I know this because both my personal doctor and the company doctor offices did not call me with warnings, a classic case of no news is good news. I still had to chase the report around a bit because the Cardiac lab sent the report to my doctor and not the company doctor, but once sorted, I got the word from the Bus Comapny last Friday to ...

We are needing to tap into all our resources to get through this period of unemployment. I'm writng to the bank to buy some time on the mortgage and I've asked Dave to help pay to have the car put back on the road. Dee is starting her own business and we will be running on faith for a little bit now. I've just completed an ECG Stress test for the bus driving role because my cholestorol was a faction high. It was an experience to be wired into the computer and treadmill. I even had a face mask so they could measure my breathing. I lasted 7 minutes and got my heart rate up to 180 and my blood pressure peaked at 220/100 or something like that. Needless to say, I'm still here and now I need the experts to analyse the results and if all things are ok, I may get to start work. I would like to write more about the whole 'getting a job driving a bus' but for now I will just cross my fingers and hope things go alright.

The family are all back from the land of the long lunch and rearing to go. Mum's 80th was really good and I was able to spend a bit of time with everyone there, but in hindsight I would have liked it to last longer. It was great to spend time with Paddy and Kirstie as they are extremely generous hosts and I don't know how Dee and I can repay them for them opening their home to us and and allowing us to use Kirstie's car as much as we did. Glenys's garden may never recover after the pounding Dee gave it, but there seems to be heaps of new plants popping up in it every day, so I suspect it will return to it's overgrown stage pretty quickly. The time we spent with Nicole, Pedy and the girls was fantastic and I was sad to see them head over the ditch for their next part of their holiday. Kirby had fun going through Mum's old photos, pulling out those that reflected say the first 30 years of my life. I now need to scan them and pop them into a digital album...