or, How to drive a bus (part 4)
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My week of classes and videos for driving the bus is over, and I passed the first test. Aced it, I guess — they gave us four hours to complete the test, and I was done in an hour and 15 minutes, and scored 93.
Now comes two weeks of hands-on training, driving the bus (but not on the street yet) and securing wheelchairs (probably with nobody in them) inside the bus.
♦ ♦ ♦
I still have doubts about this job. With office work, if you make a mistake you might get yelled at. With driving a bus, if you make a mistake somebody might die. And I make lots of mistakes, in everything I do.
Then again, I look at my classmates, especially that ex-cop. If he can do this job, I can do this job. He seems so… Wait, I don’t want to say ‘stupid’. He’s not stupid, just way too willing to say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. He has no filter.
We ended up sitting side-by-side all last week, and yeah, he’s an ex-cop, but he seems like a nice guy. All week he never said anything mean, unless you count telling our union rep that he hates unions and thinks they’re a rip-off. She laughed it off. I’m sure she’s heard worse.
It’s a closed shop, so everyone’s required to join the union, and I’m delighted to be a Teamster. I’m still on job-hunting e-lists, and a few days ago they sent notice about basically the same job I’ve been hired for — driving a disabled transit van, but for a different company, a non-union company. Their starting pay is $4/hour less than my starting pay. Yeah, give me a union every time, please.
♦ ♦ ♦
And then yesterday, what comes across on that job-hunt e-list? Exactly the job I wanted, before being hired as a bus driver.
Metro Transit is looking for someone to answer phones for the bus system, to explain to newbies how transit works, and how to catch the bus that’ll take them from where they are to where the want to be. And it pays a little more than driving the short bus. And it’s a union job. And it’s a far, far easier commute.
Driving the disabled bus, the bus barn I’d be leaving from and coming back to five times weekly is in an industrial section of a distant suburb, a very long drive from home. And ironically, bus service to the bus barn is quite bad, so I’ll have to drive.
The phone gig, though, would be either downtown (very easy commute on the bus) or work-from-home (even easier). If they’d hire me for that, I would quit driving the bus in half a heartbeat, so I’ve applied, but I applied as me — meaning, I answered the application’s open-ended questions honestly. I told them I’m a bus geek, and opened my cover letter with “Howdy,” made a couple of jokes, and blabbered on about how much I love riding the bus.
If an HR person reads my application and resumé I’ll have no chance, but if someone who gives a damn about transit reads my app I’ll be a shoo-in. Most likely, it’ll be HR and no chance. Getting that phone job would be too cool, too perfect, and nothing in life works out that well.
♦ ♦ ♦
Oh, one more thing. I gotta tell you about the CPR part of our
bus-driver training, but instead of writing it again, I’ll just paste in the email I sent to the American Red Cross:
The emergency training at my job this week was of no value whatsoever. I am kinda startled that Red Cross even allows this. All the videos and training material were branded Red Cross, but nobody from Red Cross was present.
The class was taught by a company trainer, the same person who’s teaching us how to drive a bus, and she was helped by her boss. During CPR training they disagreed about how to do chest compressions, with the boss teaching everyone to push on the
stomach instead of the chest.
They allowed and encouraged jokes all through the proceedings. One new hire was making sexual ‘grunt’ noises during Heimlich training, every time a man had to put his hand over a woman’s chest to practice the back thumps, and then do the stomach thrusts from behind. It was like 7th grade, and nobody said STOP IT except me.
All through this, the person in the room who seemed to know what to do, and answered everyone’s questions, was not one of the teachers. She was someone I’d never met, maybe another new hire who’d been CPR trained at her previous job. I’d had CPR training, too, but it’s been years, and everything about this session only confused me.
For the closing quiz, the answers were read aloud to the class, during the test, so of course everyone ‘passed’. To get any answer wrong, you’d have to write down something other than what the teacher had just said.
So 17 people got their Red Cross certification, and at least 14 of us would be useless in any emergency.
When I got home, I went to the Red Cross site, and learned more about CPR in twenty minutes than I’d un-learned in that hours-long session. Thank you for that, but I have one question:
Why didn’t we have a genuine Red Cross employee, or volunteer, or someone who knew CPR and the Heimlich maneuver, to teach us CPR and the Heimlich maneuver?
8/7/2022
Republished 11/23/2025
Next: Tumbling
or, How to drive a bus (part 5)
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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