It's over, and a new chapter begins

My last day of driving has been and gone. How did this happen?

15 August 2024. I headed to the Karori bus depot for the last time. I had ‘saved’ bus #2480, my current favourite, even though the stop request button in the seat behind the driver doesn’t work, and the indicators don’t self-cancel.

It’s a rickety old bus from 2005, with over 1,000,000 km on the clock. Yep, that’s nearly 30 times around the earth.

A parting gift—an illustration I made for my supervisor, of Bus #2480, at dawn.

If you read my last post, my first trip of the day is the 611 to Thorndon Colleges—Saint Mary’s, Wellington Girls College, and Queen Margaret College. Because of the Ministry of Education's woeful communication around the 15% earthquake rating for a large school building at Wellington Girls College, they had been shut for two days. On Tuesday, I had two QMC students on the bus, and on Wednesday, I had one. That’s one person who found a seat in the middle of the bus and was chauffeured to school alone.

Thursday, normal service resumed. The bus was back to full. My intention was to say a proper goodbye to some of the girls, especially the two who always sat up front and had given me the Easter eggs back in April.

I chickened out (no pun intended). I thought it might come across as a bit creepy—the ‘old’ bus driver telling the girls how much he had enjoyed delivering them to school each day. As I read that last sentence, I definitely made the right decision not to say anything. I’ll be forgotten as quickly as you can solve a quadratic equation, that is to say, in very short order. That makes me kinda sad.

All day as I travelled the Wellington streets, I felt surprisingly emotional that this was to be my last day.

I want to put a few thankyous out there to all the folks who heeded the call and came for a ride on the bus. Vicky and her two-year-old son, Kai, were at the first stop on the first day of my last fortnight. They rode all the way from Mairangi to Strathmore Park, and back. It was so nice to see them.

You know who you are, but I’ll list names here to immortalise you in this blog: Ian, Ritsa, Sarah, Suzanne, Jeff, Michael, Linda, Nic, and Samantha. Now I’m worried I have missed people. Memory like a sieve. To the other friends and family who took my bus because it was their way to get home or get to town, not because I was driving: Sam, Simon, Miriam, Mike, Sarah (again), Graeme, Lynley, Red, Jeff (many times), Eli, Xavier, Alex, Austin, Harper…too many to mention and I’m sure I’ve left names off this list. Suffice it to say, I was so happy and proud to drive my bus for people I knew. Thank you for being so kind about my driving abilities!

Here are a few useless stats to start wrapping up this blog:

Distance driven: average of around 125km per day, and I estimate I drove for 305 days, so 38,125 km

Number of trips: Eight trips a day (on average) so probably around 2,440 total

Number of passengers: Maybe an average of 20 people per trip (probably more) so nearly 50,000 people rode on my bus

Average speed: This is only a guess, but driving to Strathmore and back is around 44km and takes 2 hours and 30 minutes, so average speed is around 17 kph.

Delays: The latest I have ever run my bus, as in how late I was getting to the end of the trip, was 55 minutes. I have proof. There was an accident on the motorway, which caused gridlock in the city.

GPS tracker showing me running 55 minutes late on an outward bound #21 to Karori.

Hellos and thank yous: It’s a mark of achievement, maybe a miracle, for me to say hello to everyone who got on my bus and thanks to everyone who got off. Perhaps this blog should have been called “Thanks, passenger!” I realised that I’d get into this rhythm of welcoming. The first person would get a “Hello”, the second a “Gidday”, the third a “Hi”, and if someone didn’t acknowledge me, they’d get a “Thanks” after they tagged on. Then I’d repeat in that order. Over and over again.

So, why did I decide to stop doing this job?

I told a few people that management wouldn’t give me leave for our upcoming Camino adventure. That’s not entirely true, so I want to correct that here and now.

After I resigned, management assured me they would give me leave if I reconsidered my resignation. If I had accepted the leave offer, it wouldn’t have solved the other problems (for me) that came with the job.

I start work at 7.26 am every day. I finish work every day at 6.50 pm. Sure, I get three hours off in the middle of the day, but those hours aren’t worth much. To my mind, I’m still on duty. I don’t get any compensation for those hours. I have been fortunate that I live close to the depot so I can come home and walk the dog. But for other drivers who live further afield, they need to hang around waiting for the afternoon shift to begin.

Finishing at around 7 pm each night is draining and put a real dampener on my social life. It’s incredible how often I’ve been unable to go to evening events or have had to race to get there in the ‘nick of time’. That’s stressful.

And then there are weekends. On average, I’m guessing I’d work two weekends a month, either a Saturday, a Sunday, or both. Sure, you get time off during the week, but that’s useless to me if I can’t spend it with my partner.

Then there’s a thing called batch leave. Every seven months, drivers are given two weeks of leave, which is logged as annual leave. The official reason for batch leave is to relieve drivers of stress. But in reality, it’s there, so there’s never a significant debt of leave owed to the business. As drivers, we’re supposed to be able to defer batch leave, but this is often easier said than done. Sometimes, it’s just too difficult to negotiate out of this. And so, you guessed it, drivers take leave when the company tells them to, and not when it suits them and their families.

I could go on.

OK, I will.

Pay is terrible. My normal weekly take home pay (no weekends and based on my permanent shift) is $916.32. I have yet to see if the tax cuts made any difference to my take-home pay or not.

Recently, I was rostered on for a Saturday and a Sunday. That was a weekend when I was going to Auckland for a friend’s significant birthday. It was up to me to find another driver to swap my rostered day off in the week with a driver who wanted to work a weekend. This is super stressful, given that the ‘deal’ is often not complete until a few days before the event.

Then there’s management. I appreciate management has a huge and challenging job managing many drivers—around 500 people. But that’s their job. And they need to learn how to do it better. The whole time I was with Kinetic, I got one compliment, which was not directed to me specifically, but I’m happy to take it as a personal compliment. If I remember rightly, it came on the day I was running 55 minutes late. The Operations Control Centre (OCC), which comes out of Auckland in the evenings, went on the radio, heaping praise on all drivers who were managing through the difficult situation. It was such a surprise to me.

In the absence of compliments, the norm is an admonishment and a continual refrain: You must not do this, or You must do this. Most mornings, we get a continual barrage of announcements telling us not to leave our stops early, to remember to Trip On or Trip Off, to ensure people are seated, to make sure you log in to ERoad, or not to wear our hi-viz while driving. It goes on and on.

Each driver is monitored within an inch of their life. There can be up to 12 cameras on a bus. We are monitored for speed. Management knows where we are every minute of the day. They know if we leave a stop early. They know if we forgot to Trip On.

The announcements are given to all drivers, which I consider lazy practice. If drivers continually flout the rules, management should deal with the ‘offender’ directly by offering training or explaining why these rules are essential. We can’t all be the culprits here, yet that’s how we are treated.

So, those are some of the reasons I’m no longer driving. The remarkable thing is that despite these issues, I loved driving buses, and I loved my passengers.

I want to leave you with the sweetest experience I was fortunate to experience almost every day for the last month. A boy, probably aged about three or four, gets on with his mum each day from the university. If he can, he likes to sit up front.

When he gets off at his stop, he stands next to me, looks up at me and asks me a question in a tiny lispy voice—the same question every day.

“Can this bus drive on rocks?”

The first time he asked me, I said, “I’m not sure. I’ll have to find out.”

The next day, he asked me, “Can this bus drive on rocks?”

I replied, “Only if the rocks aren’t bigger than an orange!”

The next day, same question: “Can this bus drive on rocks?”

I replied, “Only if the rocks aren’t bigger than an orange!”

Fast forward a week or two.

The little boy asks, “Can this bus drive on rocks?”

I replied, “Only if they aren’t….”

“Bigger than an orange?” the boy replied.

“Exactly!” I replied.

I’m going to miss that kid.

Thanks for reading! I appreciate your support, and the fact that no-one has unsubscribed suggests that you might be interested in my Camino adventure, which is fast approaching!