Wow. Fun bus times today. From broken parts to hectic shifts… And I’ll ramble on about all of them!

Well, let’s start at the beginning.

I usually get one of our 6 GM’s. 1 is never used, and another is too short for orange route, so out of 70+ buses, I always seem to get 1 of 4. Oh well… that’s okay. Today they said my bus was in the shop. No big deal because we don’t have enough garage for all our buses. So it was probably just parked there, not that anything was wrong with it. Whoops. The shop guys said it didn’t have any brake lights and that I had to get a different bus. The dispatchers said there weren’t any other buses, so the shop had 10 minutes to fix my brake lights OR ELSE!

Somehow they did it. The dashboard indicator that lights up when the brakes are on didn’t work anymore, but at least the brake lights did. So I take off for my morning shift. It didn’t take long for me to notice that something was up in the speedometer. As I would accelerate through campus, it read 10mph… 20mph… 50mph… 90mph. Um… while the old GM’s might actually be able to go 90 miles an hour, it would take a really long, straight road downhill. Pretty much 30mph real-life equalled 90mph on my speedometer. I didn’t get a new bus out of the deal, but I did get to pretend like I was speeding around town. (No, I wasn’t really speeding… just having fun)

Let’s jump to the afternoon shift. I drive evening cardinal route. Normally I would start a new bus (Orion V, Low-floor, or 35-foot gillig), but at 5pm, there usually aren’t any of those buses available. Today, however, I saw 954 sitting right in the middle of the empty garage! 50’s series Orion V… my favorite bus style at CyRide. I took it out, looking forward to the functioning air conditioning and comfortable ride. After about a half hour, unfortunately, I realized the AC wasn’t working. Downhearted, expecting to be stuck in this bus for 3 hours, I told dispatch about it anyway, in the rare chance that they’d give me a new bus. 15 minutes later, Jason called me on the radio, saying he’d be switching me into 957, same series but with working AC. Sweet! Since I seemed to have a knack for getting broken buses today, I waited for something to be wrong with ’57. Lucily I didn’t find anything besides an extremely slowly opening front door. Annoying, but tolerable.

Normally, my bus adventures are over at 8pm. As I was filling out my class schedule after my shift, someone called on the radio saying they bumped a parked car while turning. Nothing major, but we still have to stop the bus until the dispatcher and police can get out there. I volunteered to take a new bus and resume his route, which is usually fun. You’re 10-15 minutes behind once you pull a bus out of the garage and make it to where the accident occurred, and then you try to make up the time by the end of the route without speeding. When I made it to the other bus, I was expecting maybe 10-20 people to get on my bus. After 40 loaded and more were coming, I knew it would be an “interesting” trip.

Of course traffic lights are psychic (psycho too?) and know when you’re running late. I hit almost every red light immaginable on Lincoln way, and with 40+ people on my bus, someone seemed to want off at EVERY single stop along the way. I started at the public library about 12 minutes down and by the time I made it to Beyer hall on campus was only 9 minutes late. Of course I had a request for one of the detours at the end of red route which made me even more late. Somehow I left the west end only 2 minutes late (there’s usually a 6-7minute layover at the end which helped a bit) and was empty up until HyVee. I was back on schedule by the time I hit campus, where I was switched out by the on-call. Whew! High-speed, super-fun extra hour added onto my paycheck.

See… you’d think I would really enjoy driving a bus for the next 40 years… well, maybe I can find something else I’ll enjoy too.