There is a kid on my route who has an amazing habit of almost never riding the bus, and when he does, he takes several minutes to leave his house and get on. If I drove a normal route, I could just drive off and leave him, but since my route is technically “special ed,” I have to honk my horn and wait two minutes, no matter how late I already am. Tuesday was his third day in a row of no call/no show, and on the special ed routes, that means your stop gets removed. So I went in that afternoon and talked to the routing guy, and he said I didn’t have to stop there anymore, and he was going to take care of removing the stop from my route. Yay.

Wednesday morning, I bypassed his stop and went straight to the next one. About 10 or 15 minutes later, I get a call on the radio: “Did you stop for XX?” Ugh. Evidently, the routing guy didn’t get the paperwork turned in, and the parents called in to complain before the stop had been officially removed, so now it’s back on my route. Evidently, the child had been “sick” for several days, which was their excuse for him not riding. I pull up this morning, no kid. I honk the horn and wait two minutes. No kid. I grabbed the radio mic and waited for the radio traffic to clear. Still no kid. So I called it in as another no show. I got maybe 5 minutes away, and lo and behold, the parents called in AGAIN to complain. I spent about three minutes on the radio with one of the skippers going through every detail of the stop this morning… I showed up, sounded my horn, waited three minutes, left. Why can the parents only manage to muster up the energy to call in when they want their kid to go to school? How is it that for the three days he was supposedly sick, they didn’t bother to make one single call. But as soon as he gets better, they’re on the phone with us every chance they get?

At least I got some good news today. There is a charter next week that I had wanted to do, but my drug test was scheduled for the same day and time, so I had taken my name off the list. They asked me today why, and when I told them, the dispatcher (who was sitting nearby) got a look of “Oh, crap” on her face and said, “Physicals are the same day as that charter?” Such brilliance. The charter requires 59 drivers and buses, and some brilliant person also scheduled a round of physicals for that day. So evidently, they will either try to get my drug screen moved to a different day (I don’t need the full physical, since I just had one), or they are going to move the entire day of physicals to a different day. Yay!