This morning, I got stuck covering a route for someone who drives a mini-bus, so naturally, I was expected to drive the mini-bus. I hate the mini-buses. It’s like driving a giant cube down the road, except it doesn’t handle as well as a cube might. The mirror rigs suck. The driver’s seat sucks. The steering wheel doesn’t adjust. If I sit up straight, I end up staring at the headliner instead of out the windshield to the road. I hate them, okay? I was sitting in the driver’s seat, pre-tripping the bus, and another girl who was on her last day of ride-alongs came up and knocked on the door. They had sent her out to ride with me to help with the directions, and to give her some experience. I decided to make her drive, since she knew the route area better, and since I really didn’t want to drive the mini-bus. We didn’t even leave the lot until 15 minutes after the scheduled time because they hadn’t even had me start the pre-trip until the bus was scheduled out, so we picked up every kid on the route late. It was pretty uneventful, though, and I’m thankful for that.

This afternoon, the regular drivers showed up for every single route they were going to have me sub for, except one. It was a 4-student route on the other side of town, in an area I know nothing about. Several of the skippers and supervisors spent about 10 minutes debating whether or not I should be sent on it. I didn’t really care one way or another, but I suspect that the route used a mini-bus, so I’m glad that the end result was a decision to send someone other than me.

So I got to spend even more time, just sitting around, doing nothing. Finally, they had me drive a bus around a little bit so that the guy who works on the camera/videotape systems could test one out on a bumpy road. We were driving around, and I was flying all over potholes and speedbumps, making sure the camera would continue to work. I went to turn around one corner, and had to wait for a family of mostly obese girls to cross the street in front of me. As they were walking past, they were looking up at the bus, and I heard one of them say “Ooooh, he looks good!” I don’t know if they were talking about me or the other guy on the bus, and I really don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, it applied to both of us.

After that fun trip, I got back to the lot, and got to go out as a monitor on a charter run to the annual senior ball downtown to retrieve some old folks from their day of fun and take them back to their nursing home. That was fun, but it was also very warm on a bus with old folks, since we had to keep the windows up to keep them from getting cold. If I had my way, we would have just left the windows down and turned the rear heaters on, but I guess that probably would have just made the bus uncomfortable for all of us. I finally left work 13 hours after I initially reported this morning, and I am now dog-tired. At least I have a 4-day weekend to rest it off before I have to go back in. Yay!