I’m so bent
Man… it’s not often that I’m so fired up that I have to blog it, but today I am. On Friday I went on a trip, driving a bus to Prescott for a group of band kids. The trip was overnight ending late Saturday night. As luck would have it there was another driver finishing up washing a bus that night at 10pm who saw us park without washing and came over to question us about it. I won’t go over the entire conversation except to note that I was told that I had to clean the bus the same night. As a licensed commercial driver (CDL) I am limited to the number of hours I can work - if caught working more than than 15 hours I lose my license for 180 days. That’s six months. Since I was at 15 hours that day I parked the bus after fueling it up. The other driver that went with me did the same.
My plan was to return the following day - Sunday - bringing my in trouble daughters to help clean. True to my plan I did return on Sunday, girls in tow. While I cleaned the outside of the bus they cleaned inside: sweeping, wiping down the dash and the seats, even the rail that sits above the windows. The girls were a little slow at the sweeping so I ran over it again myself. After the bus was swept twice I mopped the entire bus. I even had the oldest of the two climb into the luggage compartment to chase down errant water bottles. When I reparked the bus I realized that the inside of the windows really needed to be cleaned and we did so.
I left the bus sparkling clean - or so I thought.
At the end of my workday today I noticed that driver washing that bus. Both had just returned from a trip. I jokingly asked if the bus met her approval and to my utter surprise she looked at me and said, “no.” “The bus was filthy, you should have seen everything I swept out,” concluding that it was so bad that she brought the Director of Transportation out to the bus to show him what a mess I left it in. She went on to tell me that I should have washed it, that she told me to wash it Saturday night. Her expression was serious and even a little angry. There was nothing I could do but shrug my shoulders, the “evidence” had been thrown away.
I was in a pretty good mood up until that point.
