Things I Learned as a Bus Driver

When I drove for Pocatello Regional Transit in Pocatello, Idaho.

When I was in college, the first time, I was working for a construction company and the owner was going through a rough time in his life, and though he had previously been a good boss, he was at that point making poor choices, not paying his employees on time and getting angry at small things, so I was forced to find a new job. Mostly because I wasn’t getting paid though. One of my friends worked for the city driving the city bus and suggested that I apply there, so I did and got hired, but told myself that I would only work there until something better came along. I was there for five years, and by the way, I didn’t finish college during that time. By the time I left the bus industry, many years and several companies later, I had driven a bus for almost exactly a third of my life, not just a third of my adult life but a third of my entire life. An interesting tidbit is, when I first moved to Pocatello, Idaho, the town where I drove the city bus, I once had to ride the bus and said that I would never drive a bus. You know what they say about saying never.

During the many years that I drove a bus, I learned a great many things, and some of them were painful lessons. One of the things I learned is that, even if you have the information someone desperately needs, if they did not ask you for it they are not likely to accept it from you, and may even become hostile with you for having offered it. Let me explain. The city of Pocatello, Idaho has an agreement with the university and they run a campus route that is fare free, and during the time I drove for the city, I was often assigned to the oldest and least reliable bus in the fleet, well not the oldest, that one would be the bus used in the movie Napoleon Dynamite which was only used for special occasions, but my bus was a close second in age. The bus I typically drove had an electrical issue that necessitated removing a panel and flipping a couple of breakers to reset the effected systems.

For reasons that I no longer remember, one day I was assigned to one of the new buses and the driver with the most seniority was assigned to my typical bus, and when it inevitably had the problem previously mentioned, she called the driver with the second most seniority to ask him how to fix the problem, but he had absolutely no idea since he had never driven that bus. Once the driver said that he did not know how to fix it I responded on my radio and told her the procedure to fix it, and to my great surprise, she was not welcoming of the information and said that she did not recall asking me anything and then went on to ask for assistance from the mechanics. The mechanics also did not know what the problem was and suggested she ask the other drivers, so I again laid out the procedure for fixing the problem, and this time it was all she could do to not swear at me over the radio. It wound up that she had to sit on the side of the road for half an hour until the mechanics could get to her to figure out the problem, and then they fixed the problem in the EXACT manner that I had twice described.

This lady got off work at least two hours before I did, but she patiently waited at the dispatch until I got off work so that she could tear me a new one for daring to offer advice when it was not asked for, since she had asked the other driver instead.

“And did he have the answer?” I asked, knowing full well that he didn’t.

“No, he didn’t,” she said, “but that is not the point. No one asked you anything,”

“So,” I said, as calmly as I could, “you are telling me that you would rather get thirty minutes behind on your route than even try what I suggested to see if it helps?”

“That is correct,” she said firmly and rudely. “Unless I specifically ask for your advice, and I never will, you had better not say a (insert expletive here) thing.”

I think it is important to mention that getting behind on a route was not looked kindly upon by the city and getting behind caused the drivers a lot of stress. I mention this to stress how firmly opposed to accepting my help she really was, though I am not sure if it was just because she didn’t like me, because of my age or because how recently I had started driving a bus, just a year or so before that point. I had driven a commercial vehicle before though, but not a bus. Before driving a bus I drove a dump truck for a construction company and a large box truck for the newspaper company.

A few weeks after my confrontation with that one co-worker I offered helpful and accurate advice to another driver and my supervisor’s boss said that he would like to hear my voice over the radio a lot less, so from that point on I would completely ignore the radio unless there was some reason I was mandated to use the radio, such as being behind on a route, having a mechanical issue, or when someone specifically called for me on the radio. Even when one of the fixed routes was behind and I was driving an unstructured route such as one of the special needs routes, and was ahead on schedule, I would not volunteer to help catch them up and would only do so if specifically asked to do so by by boss or dispatch. I am not saying I was in the right by not helping anymore, but I had decided that I would no longer offer assistance or advice unless it was asked of me because I had no desire to be censured for simply offering assistance which I was qualified to give and free to offer.

Since I have decided to make this a series instead of a stand-alone blog/podcast I am not going to try to cram all of the things I learned while driving a bus and all of my funny or interesting stories into one episode, and though I had thought about doing so, I am not going to go through my experiences in a strictly chronological manner.

Another of the many things I learned while driving a bus, though not as quickly as I should have, is to be patient when people do stupid things and let the small things pass and not consider them to be personal insults. One day while driving for the city I was leaving the university area and a car pulled out of a parking lot and cut me off, almost causing an accident, so I did what I thought was the logical, and most satisfying thing to do, and that was to lay on the horn to make sure the driver knew he had done something wrong. Despite the fact that the light was green the car that had cut me off stopped in the middle of the road, but instead of just stopping, it stopped at an angle that made it all but impossible for me to get around it with the bus. After the car came to a screeching halt the driver jumped out and angrily approached my bus. At first he tried to jerk the door open, and when that failed he came around the other side of the bus. It was a hot day and there was no air conditioning on the bus I was driving, so I had my window open. When the man came around to my side of the bus he started swearing at me and tried to drag me out the open window so I put the bus in reverse and started backing up, which made the man let go of me. since the man was not able to drag me out of the bus and beat me for honking at him for almost causing an accident, he jumped back in his car and drove off. I, of course, told my boss about it and the incident was reported to the police, and it turned out the man was a professor at the university. There were never any charges filed, but I did receive more than a little satisfaction when I learned that the man who tried to assault me got fired from the university for his poor conduct.

So far, my most expensive mistake

at least as far as work goes. I almost got fired for getting the bus stuck in the mud, the company had to give the passengers a lot of their money back, as well as pay for the towing service, and I got a hefty ticket for taking a bus down that road.

After a little more than five years with the city I moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, and while I did not initially drive a bus when I moved there, I wound up driving a bus most of the time I lived there. When I first moved to Nebraska I drove a truck, but after I got laid off when things got slow I started driving for the university of Nebraska-Lincoln, as well as a party bus. I hated driving the party bus possibly even more than I hated driving a city bus, but I will get into that later.

I have, quite obviously, made a lot of mistakes in my life, and I previously told this story in an earlier podcast and blog post titled “The Parable of the Groundhog,” but it bears repeating here. During the time I drove a tour bus I often drove church groups, and I had dropped off a group of Nebraska kids at a Bible camp in Kansas and a week later I went to pick them up. When I had originally dropped off the kids and their leaders, I took the route that the GPS told me to take, ignoring the passengers when they told me to take another route that would take a half hour or so longer. The reason the passengers did not want me to follow the GPS is because it took us down a dirt road that was questionable at best. We got to the camp ahead of schedule and I didn’t see what the big deal was.

When I was on my way to pick up the kids to take them back to Omaha, Nebraska I had originally planned to take the longer route, but I got stuck in construction and was way behind, so I decided to take the shortcut. Keep in mind that the passengers were adamant that I not take the shortcut. It had rained previously, but the surface had dried and it wasn’t immediately obvious. There was a sign that read, “Road closed when wet.” Of course, I didn’t think the road was wet and ignored the sign. Once I turned onto the road I immediately knew it was wet, but decided I didn’t want to back out onto the highway and decided to proceed, after all, it was only about a quarter of a mile to the other end where I would come out on the other highway.

I was literally only about fifty feet from the end of the road when the bus lost traction and was hopelessly stuck. It really doesn’t take much to get a tour bus stuck. I called the group to let them know I would be late, and I had to call my boss to ask for a tow. A few minutes later an extremely angry sheriff showed up and immediately made sure that I knew he was not happy, and then made sure I knew how much of an idiot I was. The sheriff gave me a nearly six hundred dollar fine for failure to follow posted directions, and if he wanted, he could have also charged me for the damage to the road, but I got off lucky. The sheriff told me he had half a mind to not allow the tow trucks to pull me out and make me stay until the road dried, but he said he didn’t want my kind of stupidity to stay in his county.

I showed up five hours late to pick up my group, all because I wanted to save half an hour. In the end, it cost me close to six hundred dollars, and after paying a few thousand dollars to get the bus towed and refunding the passengers their money, I cost the company a substantial sum of money as well. The sheriff would not let the tow trucks - it took two trucks to get the bus unstuck - pull me the fifty feet to the other road and made me back all the way out the way I had come. After all the effort and trouble, I still had to take the longer route, the route I should have taken in the first place.

When I picked up the group they were livid with me, and rightly so, and if they were not Christian, they might have killed me and driven the bus back themselves. After yelling at me for half an hour, the group didn’t say a single word to me the rest of the four hour trip back to Omaha. Needless to say, I did not get a tip, nor did I deserve or expect one.

Once I got the bus back to the bus garage my supervisor informed me that he was extremely disappointed with me and he had to bend over backward to convince the company to keep me. Honestly, I was surprised that I didn’t get fired, and I completely deserved to be fired for my stupidity. I stayed with the company another four years, and I turned out to be a good investment, but they still went out on a limb by keeping me as they had no guarantee that I would make the company money and had every reason to consider me a liability. For the entirety of the next year I felt like I was walking on eggshells to keep from doing anything wrong. I made it a point to not turn down any run, regardless of how horrible I knew it would be, and I made sure not to complain about the trips or the groups. I am grateful that the company kept me, and even if they had fired me, I would not have a single bad thing to say about the company and they were one of the best companies I have ever worked for.

Of course, the most important thing I learned while driving a bus is that God is real and that he loves me, and I have talked a lot about that in the past and I will continue to talk about it. What I will say about it today is that due to driving a bus, I was put with the right people who brought me back to faith after being an atheist for three years or so, and I will forever be grateful that God did not give up on me when I gave up on him.