willowoak | work related rant...

OK, so I’ve been cast as an evil, heartless and (worst of all) incompetent bitch in a public meeting when I wasn’t there to defend myself. I’ll cop to being evil, and to occasionally being a heartless bitch, but I’m not incompetent. Not by a long shot…and the driver in question doesn’t even have 1/3 of the story.

So yesterday morning at about 6:40 I get a radio call from a driver. I respond, and she says that her bus is cold and the heater isn’t working. Now it was cold yesterday, but she was ALSO in South Minneapolis—a good 30-40 min away, because it’s the beginning of rush hour after all. And I only have one spare bus. While I’m still on the radio with her, I put a call into our shop manager, tell him what’s going on, and that we need to get the replacement bus out to her at her first school. Two minutes later, he walked in and said that he was pretty sure it was a coolant leak, because there’s a 3-4 foot wide puddle of coolant where her bus had been parked…and a trail out to the gate. Now, if she’d actually done a pre-trip inspection of her bus as she was supposed to do, she couldn’t have missed the puddle, and I would have been able to get her another bus immediately. Mind you, I don’t throw that information in her face…that wouldn’t have solved anything.

So, I’ve informed the mechanics of the issue, and given them a map of the location of her first school. I’ve told her we’re sending a replacement bus to meet her at the school, and what to look for. I’ve done everything I possibly can at this point. So I move on to the next crisis.

About half an hour later, while I’m on the phone with the district on an issue about another route, her radio rings through. I couldn’t do anything about it at that moment, since I was dealing with the district…and trying to elicit the necessary information about a stop and a missed kid from a driver whose English is whimsical at best. So this took a bit of time. And as usual, it was both frustrating and rather funny.

Not two seconds after I got off the phone, the phone rings again, and I pick it up. It’s the driver in the cold bus screaming at me. Her bus has shut down and why the hell haven’t I got a bus to her yet (it’s still 15 minutes until she’s supposed to be at her school, and she’s not even NEAR the school yet). I called the mechanic to find out where he was and to give him the “new” location to meet the bus. Then I discovered that (i) he’d dicked around a bit before actually getting on the bus to get out there and (ii) traffic’s backed up because there’s a crash ahead. Logically, none of this is my fault, but the woman is screaming at ME. It’s all my fault that her bus is cold, that the replacement bus isn’t there, and even that it’s winter in Minnesota I guess. And then the mechanic got lost (don’t ask me how…), which delayed him even more.

All of these things are circumstances well beyond my control. There was no perfect solution to the dilemma. I have to have the routes run as close to time as possible. I had ONE spare bus, and no spare qualified drivers. Given the nature of my job, if I were faced with the same set of conditions I would do it the same way again.

The problem, of course, is that most of the drivers see me sitting behind a desk answering the phone or the radio, which can look easy. But they don’t see all of what I do…most of which is juggling resources and trying to make all the pieces stretch or fit. And when they don’t, then I have to figure out something else…and at times entails me driving one route, or even parts of more than one route. The solutions are rarely perfect, but things usually work out somehow. And I’ve driven the cold bus that won’t heat up. So I know how she feels.