It’s important to know your limits, and if you’re a bus driver, that might mean knowing you need help to back the bus into a parking spot without hitting another bus.
In today’s story, management learns the hard way that they weren’t paying someone to stand around and do nothing when they cut the job of the person who helped the bus drivers back up.
Let’s see how the story plays out…
You wrote the rules!
This goes back to my days working at a large Public Transit authority.
They stressed safety at every point related to moving buses. Particularly within the depot and outside parking lots.
We had 250 buses.
As you can imagine moving large vehicles around in tight spaces can be hard on buses, infrastructure and people.
It sounds really hard to back up all these buses perfectly.
The layout for our outside lot required about 50 buses to be backed in. Two rows of 25 nose to tail.
Rules required that when backing a bus we always had to have a “backup helper.”
For obvious reasons, backing 15 ton vehicles into other 15 ton vehicles can lead to mayhem.
Especially after dark and in poor weather.
Management decided they didn’t want to pay someone to stand around and do this.
This sounds like an important rule.
There were 6 shifters. (Operators working the yard to move buses after they pulled in.
Parked for the night, or moved to maintenance)
Rules state you NEVER leave a bus unattended.
If it’s running someone is in the seat.
Now there’s a line of buses waiting for help.
First night, first bus goes outside and calls the yard dispatcher for help.
Yard dispatcher ignores them.
Next bus, same thing.
After the 6th bus arrives in the yard waiting for backup help the line for pullins was 10 deep around the block and all the shifters were in the yard.
The backup guy got a lot of overtime!
The neighborhood hates the depot anyway.
Calls to police begin about buses blocking the streets.
Yard dispatcher is flipping out.
The backup guy was back within the hour.
On overtime for the balance of the pick (about 3 months) since management had eliminated the job.
It usually went to an operator on restricted duty for whatever reason.
They wrote the rules. Not our job to ignore them.
I think they learned the hard way that they weren’t paying someone to stand around and do nothing!
Let’s see how Reddit reacted…
This reader suggests following the rules.
Never mess with a bus driver.
This person has a good story about a bus driver.
Another reader thinks one part of the story wasn’t emphasized enough.
The guy who was “standing around and doing nothing” got the last laugh!
As it should be.
Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.