misc Saturday musings

 

For five years now, I have been delivering the Sunday papers commercially.  We do not do Home deliveries; our job is to drop papers at stores and street racks.  Home deliveries are completely separate from our job.

Today, my papers were in bundles of tens (the papers are assembled by machines upstairs and come to us bundled up and ready to load in our delivery vehicles.  Home delivery people have to assemble the parts of the papers by hand)  I haven’t really paid attention to just how many papers I get – I do pay attention to how many bundles I get.  I go downtown and get all the papers and meet the other driver and give her her share to deliver, (we have two routes, Milwaukie and SE Portland) but today, they are in bundles of ten, and I know exactly how many individual papers I got – 680.  These are the First Edition; tonight, I’ll go get the Final Editon.  We get more Finals than Firsts, so tonight, I think I’ll be getting more than 800 papers – like I said, I’ve never really paid attention to how many I get, I just drop ’em off.

Sounds bad, put that way, doesn’t it.

Tens are EASY to deliver – if a stop like Walgreen’s gets 30 papers today, well, that’s three bundles.  The papers are usually in bundles of sevens or eights, and it takes a little more thought to drop the right amounts at my stops, but many of my stops are tens or multiples of ten – the Safeway I deliver to got 75 papers today and will get 85 tonight.

(When I first started this job, five years ago, my Safeway got 90 papers today and 110 tonight.  Readership of the papers has declined significantly)

I’m more than a little worried though.  For the third week in a row, the papers have been in bundles of more than 8,  They were in 9’s the week after Christmas, and that’s not unusual – fewer ads make for thinner papers, but last week, they were in bundles of 12, and today, they were in 10’s.  I have never seen that before, 3 weeks in a row, and it worries me because the paper gets most of it’s revenue from the ads.  More and more businesses are going under, or cutting back on advertising.  Curcuit City is the latest to declare bankruptcy – they always had a four to seven page ad in our paper.  On the one hand, I am SO glad I used up that $25 gift card I had from CC, but on the other, ohhh shit.  This job currently pays for my car, and if the paper goes under….

The other thing that occured to me is that I am working seven days a week.  People in this building (many elderly and handicapped people) think I work a LOT, and if I do, why the fuck am I soo poor?  I drive a school bus more than 40 hours a week, and do this paper job on the weekends (about 9 hours for the two editions, normally) so I wonder how come I’m always scrapping by the end of the month.  The bus job pays once a month, but the papers pays ever week, and by the end of the month, I am in need of that papers check.  Since I work Saturdays and Saturday nights, there’s no time for anything like dating.

You’d think that school bus drivers would be well paid – we have direct interaction with the kids, and are the first and last people from the school district to see them.  The hourly rate is not bad, and the more we work, the less of our health, vision, and dental plans do we have to pay, and that turned out to be a very good thing in September and October, when I was out of work for a month with neck disc problems (three out of place, causing nerves to my right arm to get pinched – it HURT).  I got a statement from the insurance company, and so far, the diagnosis, MRI, and surgery has cost close to $12,000.  Thankfully, there is a limit to my co-pays, which I exceeded, so it didn’t cost too too much out of pocket (but it did enough so that I’m going to be short of my car payment, due today).

School Bus driving is a good job, but since we are the first and last people from the district to see the kids, the responsibility is quite high, and it bugs me that the district’s gardeners, who have NO interaction with the kids are better paid than we are.  Contract renewal is coming up, and to anyone who says we are overpaid, I say fine.  You get in a bus, drive it on streets filled with idiot drivers, with 80 kids at your back, and do my job.  Drive that 43 foot vehicle that people apparently think stops on a dime, with 80 yelling and screaming kids behind you, and tell me if I’m overpaid.  Not everyone can do this job.  Many people can drive large vehicles, yeah, but drive a bus and manage dozens of kids, AT THE SAME TIME?  With your back to them?  Alone? 

Uh uh.  Not everyone can cut it, and if a fight breaks out on your bus? Oh shit.

This is the second week of the second seesion of the CAFE program, a kind of "Latchkey Kids" program that keeps ’em busy after school until 5:15 pm.  I clock in at 6:35 am, and clock out the last time at 6:30 pm.  Yeah, I clock out after the am runs for a few hours, but I clock back in and work five-six more hours in the afternooons and evenings, and deal with kids who don’t fully realize that their behavior on the bus directly affects their safety.  If they sit right, "seat to seat, back to back, facing forward" the kids are in the safest vehicles on the road.  If they do not, and many time they don’t, their safety is directly dimi

nished.  I like my job, and enjoy it, for the most part, but these kids!  The rules on the bus are FOR THEIR SAFETY,  not for me to be a dick to them, but try telling the young ones that!

In fact, I had to talk to two moms this week, because their kids complained that the bus driver was being mean to them, and I explained just what I have written here, that to be safe, they have to ride safely.  We have cameras (digital video cameras now) that not only protect the driver against false claims from girls that the driver "touched them inappropriately", but also to protect the district against claims that the kids were injured – if they don’t ride right, it could well be their own damn fault they got hurt.  Last year, I served a different Elementary School, and some kid’s parents sued the District (deep pockets, you know), saying their little angel got hurt on my bus in an accident I had when someone ran into me.  The camera showed that not only didn’t the kid get hurt, but that (amazingly) the kid was properly seated too.  I got transferred to a different school, and I have to tell you, I do NOT miss any of those kids – they were the LONGEST 40 minutes of my day.

I not only talked to two sets of parents this week.  On Wednesday, an Elementary School kid fell asleep on my bus, and I didn’t find him until I got to the High School I serve.  I’m driving a new bus this year which has a "sleeping child" alarm on it that I have to walk to the back of the bus to disable, and found the kid as I did so.  I had to take him back to the stop he missed, fortunately a day care center not awfully far from the High School, but I lost my place as the number three bus and had to park at the end of the line when I got back, ten buses back, and go and find my High school kids.  I dropped them off, but was a few minutes late to the Middle School I serve next, and the Middle School kids were very vocal in their observation of how late I was.

grrrr

Yesterday, something like that happened again, but this time with a kindergartener.  I am not allowed to let kindies off if no adult is waiting for them; I have to take them back to their school so they can be held until the parents come to get them.  This happened at the third to the last stop on that run, but it worked out so that I wasn’t very late to the High School, and I was on time for the Middle School.

4 days a week, the Middle School kids are not my last run; I have to go back to the Elementary School and pick up the CAFE kids and take them home too, and those days work out to be twelve hours long, minus a few hours mid-day.

So I gotta ask.  If I work soo much, how come I’m broke by the end of the month?  I need a reliable car to get to and from the bus job, and a new car means high insurance rates.  I live in Public Housing, so the rent is not so high, but these things add up.  Gas, food, and cigarettes and coffee cost $, as does the internet accesss bill, the cell phone bill, the storage unit (I live in a studio apartment – not a lot of space)  I have to feed my cat, and clean his box, and by the time I do all that, I’m poor again.

Since I work so much, and have so little to show for it, dating is a waste of time and money, so that’s a dead end, so it’s just me and my cat and my computer.  Dating COSTS, even if it’s just coffee, cuz no woman seems to expect anything bu the most expensive Starbucks drinks – and buying dinner?  Try to go dutch and see if you get a second date.  It’s a wasted effort all around.

***

It has been and will be for the foreseeable future below freezing at night, but the days lately have been Beautiful, and today is a fine (but COLD) day, and I must go downtown to check my PO box (which I am going to drop in June when the payment is due – $ I don’t need to spend, although I’ve had that PO box for 11 years now)  If anyone has that address, write to me and I’ll return my home address to you.

Ten years ago, I was in an Adult Foster Care home and the insurance that got me through the car wreck ran out and I had to move out on my own, and that was the first time I saw this apartment – had to sign up for it two weeks in advance.  So, the ten year anniversary of living here is two eeeks away.  It is the longest I have lived anywhere in my life.  Between 15 and 36, I lived in 43 different places – two countries, the Us and Japan, and 10 states:  California, Arizona, Nevada, Illinous, Pennsylvainia, Virginia, Maine, South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Oregon.

The west is the best.  Oregon is the BEST place I’ve lived in this life… but after three school years of driving a bus, I can go anywhere and find work.  It’s funny that that’s worked out to be my career, but I love to drive, and with kids on board?  I’m not just delivering some knick knacks; I’m driving our future.

Sometime it depresses me – kids are very different now than when I was that age.

*****