Confessions of a Bus Driver
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 start on Monday.
For the week leading up to this, I was being a labourer for a bobcat & tipper operator called Dave. Dave is hard as nails, fit as a fiddle and goes at a million miles per hour to clean up the new housing sites he has been assigned. It was all I could do to keep up and not get bulldozed into a pile of rubbish or broken brick as we cleaned up each site.
It was my job to leap out of the tipper truck almost before Dave has stopped, wind down the legs of the bobcat trailer and open the door to manhandle the heavy ramps. By the time I'd done that 20 times in the past week, I was actually able to lift the ramps, but it was hard going all the same. I also had to pile up the rubbish so that Dave could get at it quickly, everything was done quickly, even lunch was done quickly on the way to the tip in the old truck that didn't have much suspension. It was a circa 1980 International...groan...It looked like this, but was considerably dustier :)
This was my lunch room, if you can imagine me being tossed around inside a washing machine at 30mph...
I must have drunk more H2O that week than I would in an average month. I also got to visit several of the local tips as we unloaded bricks, rocks and dirt at one tip, and general building rubbsih at other tips in an effort to minimize the cost of this tipping service. By Friday, I was hanging for the call from the bus company. Thank God it came, and now I just need to make this Bus Driving thing work for me and the girls...
Please Stand behind the Driver!
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 start on Monday.
It was my job to leap out of the tipper truck almost before Dave has stopped, wind down the legs of the bobcat trailer and open the door to manhandle the heavy ramps. By the time I'd done that 20 times in the past week, I was actually able to lift the ramps, but it was hard going all the same. I also had to pile up the rubbish so that Dave could get at it quickly, everything was done quickly, even lunch was done quickly on the way to the tip in the old truck that didn't have much suspension. It was a circa 1980 International...groan...It looked like this, but was considerably dustier :)
This was my lunch room, if you can imagine me being tossed around inside a washing machine at 30mph...
I must have drunk more H2O that week than I would in an average month. I also got to visit several of the local tips as we unloaded bricks, rocks and dirt at one tip, and general building rubbsih at other tips in an effort to minimize the cost of this tipping service. By Friday, I was hanging for the call from the bus company. Thank God it came, and now I just need to make this Bus Driving thing work for me and the girls...
Please Stand behind the Driver!
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