Personal Finance Canada

I agreed to come out of retirement to be a spare driver for a rural school. It turns out that they hadn't found a replacement for my old route, so they basically wanted me to drive full time hours while they got someone up to speed.

Okay, that's not really what I was interested in, but I could handle a couple of weeks. So I get the paperwork by email late Friday, right before the long weekend, with school starting on Tuesday. That's when I learn that my old route, which was already pushing the time limits, had been extended by about 35 minutes (my estimate, the paperwork still showed a total time the same as last year, which was already an underestimate).

I spent about 6 hours on Saturday with no administrative support trying to sort things out with parents. When I looked closer at the schedule to see just exactly how admin thought this new configuration could work, I noticed that they had the route length at 100 km and the first pickup 1 hour before arrival at school. That's an average of, yes, 100 km/hr. No time for corners, stop signs, and yield signs. No time for farm equipment and graders. No time to get in and out of yards with kids loaded and seated.

Oh, and being grid roads (gravel) with no other signage, the actual speed limit is 80 km/hr!

So I let the parents know that they'd have to carry on with whatever their transportation plans were on Thursday. Then I emailed admin to say I'd changed my mind, and why. I haven't heard anything back from admin, but all of the parents completely support my decision and are planning a parent group meeting with admin to help me get paid for the time I put in. (Normally, route planning is not paid, because the route is supposedly preplanned by admin. Minor tweaks are supposed to be the responsibility of the full time driver, not just a spare.)

I've always hated working with incompetent people and dysfunctional organizations. Now I don't have to.