Wednesday, December 14, 2022

WHY IS THERE SO MUCH HATRED FOR BUS DRIVERS?

 

It's a mystery right? What did bus drivers ever do to anyone that would cause such animosity? Surely all people driving transit buses are doing it for the good of mankind and do the job because they want to help those less fortunate right? 

WRONG! 

I've been retired from this profession over a decade now but I was involved with it for 1/2 my working life. 20 years to be exact, 15 of which were in Portland Oregon at the TRIMET. 

My very first position was when I was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts. Believe it or not it was the "top" job in the "work study" financial aid programs. (do they even have that anymore). Everybody loved us bus drivers and we loved chatting it up with the riders. I did that for a couple years and was done with it. Little did I know that 15 years later I would once again find myself behind the seat of a transit bus at SANTA ROSA transit in California. 

Things were not so nice and friendly over there. And a lot of the drivers were ex truck drivers not college students. This is when I started finding out that there are more than a few people doing this job that literally don't  like people. But Santa Rosa Transit was a small  agency and there weren't that many social problems in the 80's as there are today. Still there were no shortage of drivers that took some sociopathic pleasures in messing with some of the riders. Even then I found it quite disturbing. I was a very valued employee while at Santa Rosa and they tried hard to get me to continue working there but for personal reasons it was impossible to continue, nor did I see myself as a "career" bus driver. It was just something I did to fill in some income gaps.

About 15 years later my third wife convinced me to move to Portland and I was looking for a way to get health insurance for my wife and I. Low and behold TriMet had an ad running for drivers so I went ahead and applied and landed the job. 

Now this was a world I was unfamiliar with. Portland is an actual city, a smaller city but still a city and its transit district functioned like the bigger cities do. I think there were 60 drivers at Santa Rosa TriMet had almost 1000 at the time.(I think)

Being involved with TriMet was my "real" education on the realities of transit drivers. When I was working at TriMet I remember walking into break rooms and some of the drivers were finding it funny when they left people behind, or splashed them,  or kicked them off the bus they all laughed about these events. I witnessed more than a few bus drivers that refused to open the doors for mothers and children during pouring rainstorms because they "were on their breaks". It was this experience at TriMet that I woke up to the sheer brutality of many of the people involved with this type of work. Mind you this is more than a decade ago.

Now, after all we the people have gone through at the hands of the elites and their psychological operations to destabilize our minds there is a whole new level of brutality that happens in the transit operations. 

When I was doing this job nobody was ever kicked off for being "drunk" or a "biohazard" or "insane". Now its standard operating procedure. 


I listen to TriMet operations daily and every single day there are numerous instances of people being denied rides for this or that reason. Do bus drivers even understand that every time they strand someone they have made an enemy for all bus drivers? Apparently they don't and maybe they even laugh about it like they did when I was there. They did it back then because they could get away with it. Now its standard operating procedure.

Yes bus driving has turned into a dangerous job, and a lot of the reason for that is the bus drivers themselves and the policies that promote degradation of the people they are supposed to be serving.

Do the drivers and 'LEADERSHIP TEAMS" have the slightest clue that it may be themselves that are creating all this mess?

Who knows. But its only getting worse and worse and worse.


WHEN YOU TREAT PEOPLE BADLY IT COMES BACK ON YOU!

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