(13 Oct 2022, 1:25 pm)Driver9*** wrote Spoken by someone who has never spent a day in his life driving buses. I bet you have some romantic notion of the job whereby all the passengers and car drivers are nice to you and you wave at the bus spotters with a cheery grin on your face as you drive by. The reality is far different.

I've got plenty of mates who drive a bus, and I see first hand every day what their job is like.

I recently did a driving job and was quite surprised how much I preferred the "stress" of simply being stuck in traffic or not having a convenience convenient, as opposed to the stresses of my other fixed location jobs (RSI, productivity targets, unpredictable activity, manual handling).

I currently earn under £10ph, and I rationalise such a shit wage in part because at least I don't have to put up with the general public. My view on that even changed a little when my limited interactions with the public in that role were 99% positive. I found it helps when you are doing something that helps them and are doing it in a cheery way, not letting whatever problem is affecting you affect them, even when, especially when, it might be something they did that caused your problem.


Not to mention the fact this strike is allegedly about their wage apparently not being enough to live on, rather than the conditions under which they have to work (and have done for at least twenty years I would say).

I look around these days and I don't get the impression drivers are all that stressed, with one last week looking pretty rain chuffed with himself as he swanned off to his break, having driven his bus early for the last 5 miles of his route. That driver afaik voted to strike recently.

Any driver that thinks they could cut it in a call centre, try it. I would say with some certainty that of a 100 drivers that went to a call centre, perhaps 1 would still be in the job this time next year, having either been fired or absolutely hated the job. In the other direction, I would say the figure could be easily as high as 10, which is probably close to the industry standard for retention, in a notoriously stressful and depressing job.

My cousin was a call centre employee. She coped with the stress by being so good at her job she worked her way up into management, meaning that in ten short years she has turned a shit set of GCSE results into a wage that bus drivers would call luxuriant. Yet she and her partner still voluntarily work long hours in stressful jobs, because that's how they were raised is what you do when you have responsibilities, like a house and kids.

I doubt there are many drivers, certainly at Sunderland by the looks of it, who have the same outlook on life.