As I think about the meeting we had last week I keep thinking about how the county is going to be cutting the pay that we get, but increasing our work load. I’ve never been keen on the idea of having to do some of the things that they require, such as fueling our own buses and washing our own buses. That’s one of the biggest reasons I’ve been thinking about just remaining a substitute driver; when you are a substitute driver you don’t ever have to wash a bus, and if you are lucky you don’t have to fuel a bus very often. Of course there are times when you are given a sub bus where the tank is on empty and that is a major aggravation because you don’t usually have the time to fuel up before leaving on the run!
But one of the things that annoys me the most is that they are now saying that whenever a school bus hits anything at all – including tree branches that hang over the road that they are to report it to dispatch. What a pain in the neck that is going to be! I can’t recall ever driving a bus where the bus didn’t brush up against some branches somewhere along the road! And some of the turn around spots are so overgrown that you can’t turn around without scraping up against shrubs or trees! So I don’t know how that is going to go over!