I got to drive buses for almost three hours today! And it was so much fun. First, I got to drive from the training place over to the depot that I will be driving from once I start working for real. That involved taking the school bus out on the highway, which was “fun”. The instructor showed us around there a bit, then we picked another bus to take out on our practice route, so that we can get used to different types of equipment. We ended up on some rickety 10-year-old bus with a very non-adjustable, uncomfortable seat. My back still hurts from it. But driving it was kind of nice, since it had hydraulic brakes instead of air brakes, so I didn't have to remember to start breaking about half a second before I want the bus to actually begin to slow down.

Tomorrow is more training at 7 AM, then we're off on Monday. And I found out that my CDL skills test has been scheduled for April 1st, so that's still another two weeks off. I just hope the examiner doesn't feel the need to take advantage of testing me on April Fool's day.

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I FINALLY got to drive the bus today! I have missed it SO much. I totally amazed myself, too, by managing to successfully complete every single part of the maneuverability tests that we practiced today. These were right-hand turn, backward serpentine, alley dock, and parallel parking. All of them with a 38-foot school bus. Go me!

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Today I noticed that my instructor has yet another interesting little pronunciation glitch. She refers to the convex mirrors on the bus as “convict” mirrors. That probably doesn't help the view that some kids have of buses and schools as prisons.

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Hmph. Evidently a little bit of snow in March can stop the buses from running, or at least stop my training from happening. My first day of driving is now delayed until 8AM tomorrow, which was originally supposed to be 7AM tomorrow. Oh well.

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While pre-tripping the bus this morning, the instructor was going over all the points that we have to go over when we go to take our CDL skills test. Based on the way that she said some of the words, I could tell that she'd never really paid attention to how the spelling correlates to the pronunciation. When we were going over steering system components, she kept talking about the “Carter pins” and “Tire rod”. Now I'm just taking a stab in the dark here, but I think she meant to refer to cotter pins, and the tie rod. The tire rod is something you use to hit people over the head with, at least in my book. My personal favorite, though, was when we were talking about the flexible couplings in the drive shaft. She kept talking about “cuff links”. It was all I could do to hold back some very mean comments, not that she would have understood why I was making fun of her.

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So today was the first day of my behind-the-wheel training as a school bus driver. Even though I didn't actually get BTW (making it a bit of a misnomer, at least for today), I did still have a lot of fun.

More joys of bus driving…

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Yay! I FINALLY get to drive a bus on Monday! I cannot wait! I'm kinda bummed, though, because it seems as though my behind-the-wheel training is still only going to be 4 hours per day, split with another person, which just isn't very much driving in my book. Oh well.

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