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Monday, November 14, 2011

Y'know how I like to park beside something big and play "Who's Longer" and my truck usually wins?






GAME OVER.




I think driving a school bus could be fun.  Especially putting on the brakes and telling all the brats to siddown and shuddup I'm not yer babysitter.

I mean, c'mon.  Big ass International diesel?  Giant wheels?  Fun.

Sadly, they're all automatic now.  Remember the old Saginaw transmission in the 70s and 80s?  I watched my bus driver double-clutching that thing through the gears, with it whining and chugging all the way up.  Awesome.  He used to literally throw the shifter into gear.  


Good times.

However I am 40 years old and still having nightmares about running down the lane to catch my bus, with the north wind ripping at my flapping-open coat and all the snow drifts ending up inside my boots,  so I don't think I'll be making a career of being Bus Driver Dude.  



"I stand by my record.  14 crashes and not a single fatality!"   --Otto.

5 comments:

Heidi Willis said...

Oh my gosh I TOTALLY dream of running and missing by bus!! Is that a universal stress dream??

I remember the grinding of the gears too. I hadn't thought about the fact that the busses now don't sound like that.

One driver lives in our neighborhood and parks her bus in her driveway. Very weird. There are bus lots... so how she has permission to park at home is beyond me. I get anxious driving the big truck... I'll pass on a bus!

Heidi the Hick said...

Will we ever stop running for the bus in our nightmares?????

All the bus lines around here have the drivers park them at home. Luckily in farm country there is room to park a bus... it saves them a good twenty minutes each day which is handy when the first pick up is at Stupid O'clock in the morning.

I've been told I should drive a school bus. I could work around the hours and it's steady work 10 months of the year. They do all the training for the B license. I mean, I already have to be careful not to drive over the curbs with my back tire....

But I probably won't. I have enough part time jobs to keep me busy, right?

Paul Tee said...

Mechanically I wouldn't mind, I can grind gears as good as the next man, but it's the extra stuff that scares me off:

Johnny absolutely has to go to the bathroom, like... five minutes ago...

Bruce's nose is bleeding...

Jimmy forgot his lunch... and his underpants...

Hey, my show-and-tell scorpion got loose from it's box...

Tommy got a pencil stuck up his nose...

Jeffrey is smoking pot... he is only 13, it's illegal for him to smoke...

Hey, Samantha threw my boots out the window...

Joe threw up his breakfast... all over Janice...

Dough's mom is chasing us, you forgot to pick him up again... (The kid is 14 minutes late every morning! Grrr!)

Daylight saving is not until next week...

Somebody got peanut butter on this bus, Kenny is already going into anaphylactic shock...

Damn, the snowplow hadn't cleared the side roads yet, but if I stay equidistant between the telephone poles, I should be all right... I hope.

Holy ***it! That's the fifth dog/cat/raccoon/skunk/wild turkey we ran over this week...

Anonymous said...

Haha! Great post! I used to have reoccuring dreams of realizing I'm naked on the bus just as a bunch of people are getting on! What is it about busses that gives us nightmares? I love Paul's comment, too!

- Terri (Olly - when I had my blog. Still read yours:-)

Bus Training said...

Driving school bus is obvious a fun but with that there is a big responsibility on you as you have to carry many kids in that. So to handle this situation it's always better to take proper training so that you can know the techniques to drive safe.