These last few months of life without work are as close as I’ll ever come to kickin’ back for my golden years, but my savings are dwindling, so I need to kiss leisure goodbye and find a job.
It can’t be just any job, though. At my age I am picky, dang it. I refuse to apply for an office job — the work I’ve done most of my life — because there’s gotta be some job more interesting than data entry and preparing reports and fixing other people’s clerical mistakes.
I won’t work for a company that’s openly evil. Here in Seattle, that means there’ll be no Amazon, Boeing, or Microsoft for me. I have no delusions of making the world a better place, but I won’t do work that makes the world even worse. So where am I going to punch a time clock?
Dick’s Drive-In looked like a bearable job. They’re a local fast-food chain that pays a living wage with health benefits. They make good burgers, great fries, and employees get free food, and I could do that. So I filled out a form on their website, and they may have called me back a few days later — there was a call from a number I didn’t know. I’d forgotten to turn my phone’s ringer on, though, and if that was them, they didn’t leave a message and didn’t call again. Lesson learned. I turned my phone’s ringer on.
Saw a Craigslist ad, looking for someone to provide live-in care for a disabled guy. It said no experience was required, just patience and a willingness to wipe someone else’s ass, etc. Well, who wouldn’t be intrigued by that? I replied to the listed email address, and explained that I’d taken care of my wife after she’d been disabled, which on bad days, yes, included wiping her ass. There was no reply.
I didn’t send a second inquiry to either Dick’s or the ass-wiping job. The so-called experts on job-hunting say you should, that ‘follow-up’ like that makes you stand out to prospective employers, but screw it. I’m willing to flip burgers or wipe a stranger’s ass, but I’m not willing to kiss a stranger’s ass. If a job wants me, here I am, but I’m not going to beg and plead.
I’m a big believer in public transit, so maybe I’d enjoy driving a bus? I looked into it, but it looks like hell on wheels. Assignments are seniority-based at Metro Transit, and I’m old, so I’d never get much seniority. I’d always be either driving the worst routes through the worst neighborhoods at the worst times, or driving sixty screaming kids to school in the morning and to their homes in the afternoon, with unpaid hours off in between. In a word, no.
Answering the info-line for Metro would be a good fit for me — helping people figure out which bus goes from Everett to Tacoma, or Westlake to Wallingford. But alas, Metro is a giant government agency, and actually talking to someone about a particular job is impossible. Best I could do was sign up for daily emails listing all their job openings, so I did, but every day, nine out of ten openings at Metro are management jobs, with titles that include ‘chief’, ‘manager’, ‘planner’, ‘analyst’, ‘executive’, even ‘superintendent’. I’m not management material. The very few jobs where Metro Transit wants actual workers seem to be ‘painter’ or ‘accountant’ or ‘janitor’ and I’m not that, either.
A car detailing company had an opening for a dispatcher. That’s office work, which like I said is absolutely not what I want to do again, but the company is family-owned, and the ad listed full benefits, and it had a picture of all their nine employees smiling, and that picture sure looked great. Two of the employees were black, two were fat, two were old, and some were more than one of those adjectives, so I think they really are the equal opportunity employer they say they are. Maybe they’d hire fat old funny-looking me, but I lost their number before calling them, and the ad disappeared so the job is filled.
♦ ♦ ♦
That’s how my job hunt was going, until a week or so ago, when a listing jumped out at me — driving the short bus. Disabled transit. Hmmm.
If you’re disabled, riding the city bus can be difficult or even impossible, but thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), in any city that has bus service, you can get a van and driver to pick you up for the same price as bus fare. The driver will help you into the vehicle, and take you where you need to be, with door-to-door service like a taxi, but with other passengers sharing the ride like a bus.
Disabled transit was a lifeline for my wife, as her health declined and she couldn’t drive. It’s how she got to dialysis and back, three times a week. And one able-bodied person is allowed to accompany the disabled rider, so when our car wasn’t running or wasn’t reliable, we sometimes rode the disabled bus to dinner and a movie, or to a doctor’s appointment.
Yeah, definitely, I could drive a van for disabled transit. It’s work that actually helps people who need help. It makes the world a better place, not shittier. And it’s a union job that pays pretty well, with full bennies.
I filled out a form online. They called me later the same day, and hooray, my ringer was on. They checked my driving record, and found no fatalities, no tickets for decades. They checked my criminal record, and found that I’m not a criminal. I aced the interview, because I know how disabled transit works. “The service we provide is the difference between someone having a meaningful life, or just being stuck at home,” I said, because I saw it first-hand with my late wife.
When I said it in the interview, everybody nodded. They might have also been impressed at my frugality, because I was wearing a new shirt I’d bought at Goodwill the day before, and hadn’t noticed that the $8 price tag was still attached to the shoulder.
And just like that, I was “conditionally hired,” pending a physical exam. They sent me to a doctor (and paid for it!), I coughed while he held my testicles, and apparently I’m in good health despite my age and weight, so I’m hired. Three weeks of training begins on Monday, and after that I’ll be driving the short bus.
7/27/2022
Republished 11/19/2025
Next: Studying for the short bus
or, How to drive a bus (part 2)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10
Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15
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