Apparently the fear of losing their jobs if they lose their cool and blow up at passengers is grounds for threatening a strike, at least according to the president of Local 279 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents OC Transpo bus drivers.

“With the flick of my fingers, we could end up with having the buses not being out on the road” –ATU 279 president Garry Queale

I heard that priceless quote on CBC’s morning show as I was getting ready to head to work this morning and it’s in a story on CBC’s website, too.

In the last week there have been there have been at least three incidents where OC Transpo drivers have behaved completely unprofessionally towards passengers and at least two of them have had repercussions for the drivers:

• a driver was fired for swearing at and threatening a teen,
• a driver abandoned his bus at the Rideau Centre after a passenger complained about him being 40 minutes late (I wrote about this yesterday), and
• a driver apparently decided he was done driving his route and kicked his passengers (mostly senior citizen) off the bus in the middle of nowhere (no report as to what action is being taken against the driver as a result).

Most people would probably agree that bus drivers don’t have the easiest of jobs. While they are well-paid, they take the brunt of the complaints and abuse from passengers unhappy with the service for whatever reason, even if it’s beyond the driver’s control, such as the recent changes to the bus routes in Ottawa. Even with this, many bus drivers put up with it and strive to provide good customer service so they can take pride in their work. But this doesn’t seem to be true for every bus driver, as evidenced by the list above.

Contract negotiations between ATU 279 and OC Transpo are scheduled to start December 8th. ATU 279 reportedly is interested in improving workplace conditions instead of salary, but the fact that they’re already threatening to strike suggests that perhaps the union’s negotiation strategy is based on threats and intimidation rather than genuine negotiation. Someone should remind them how that worked out for the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organizaton (PATCO) in 1981 when they tried something like this. (Hint: On August 5th, 1981 unemployment in the US  increased by 11,345 people.)

There have been three high-profile incidents involving bus drivers in the last week or so. One that CBC reported on yesterday involves a passenger who asked a driver why he was 40 minutes late and after a short back and forth between the two of them the driver got off the bus. The ATU 279 has responded by supporting the driver saying he did the right thing in extricating himself from a conflict situation with a passenger. In the video attached to the story on the CBC site, the union is reported as saying that all their drivers should report conflict situations to their controller, pull over and put the four-way flashers on and wait for someone to show up and that if this means that buses are pulling over on the 417 “so be it”.

It concerns me is that this could result in buses stopping at the side of the 417, a highway where there’s often not a lot of clearance at the sides of the road, particularly downtown, meaning that any vehicle at the side of the road is at risk of being hit. In the case of a bus where there could be 30 or 40 people on board, that’s putting an awful lot of people on the bus at risk, not to mention passing drivers. I hope that drivers will be more responsible and leave the 417 and pull over at the side of the road after they’ve left the high-speed highway where it will be safer to stop.

As for the passenger in yesterday’s incident who demanded to know why the bus was 40 minutes late and upon not being told why encouraged his fellow passengers to complain, too, I think he needs to remember that the drivers are accountable to their employer (i.e. OC Transpo) for their job performance and not directly to the passengers. There can be circumstances beyond the driver’s control, such as being called in to replace a bus that broke down or heavy traffic that can cause a bus to be legitimately late. One shouldn’t automatically assume that it’s the driver’s fault that he or she is late. Even if it is the driver’s fault, there’s no need to be a jerk about it and take it out on the driver — call customer relations at 613-842-3600 or file a complaint online at http://www.octranspo1.com/about-octranspo/customer_service.

…pedestrians in the crosswalk have the right-of-way. The fact that you entered the intersection late in the cycle when turning left does not give you the right to block the oncoming traffic while you sit in the intersection at the crosswalk honking your horn and yelling at the pedestrians who are crossing with the light.

In just over an hour we North Americans are supposed to turn our clocks back an hour in the vain quest of pursuit of saving energy.

I say “vain pursuit” because although daylight saving time is promoted as leading to an overall reduction in energy consumption, there hasn’t been any proof that this has ever been accomplished. Check out David Prerau’s book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (hardcover: 1560256559; softcover: 1560257962) if you want to learn more about the history of daylight saving time. It’s actually more interesting than it sounds.

If you’re a *NIX system administrator you probably updated your systems a couple of years ago, but in case you haven’t you probably should take a look at this. The zdump command should give you something like this:

[gordon@seedling gordon]$ /usr/sbin/zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2011

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 13 06:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Mar 13 01:59:59 2011 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 13 07:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Mar 13 03:00:00 2011 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  6 05:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Nov  6 01:59:59 2011 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  6 06:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Nov  6 01:00:00 2011 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

I had a fairly busy week this week. To put things in context, I’ve put together a little table that shows what I was up to.

So, several very long days that started way too early in the morning. Sleeping in this morning was nice and I’m looking forward to repeating that tomorrow.

I headed out with fellow geocachers Nikon-Guy and Photocrasher to see how many caches we could find at the Go And Get ‘Em 16 (GC3486K) Friday evening that I wrote about last week. We started the evening with a couple of FTFs (first to finds) and then started bumping into other catchers as the evening wore on. With the exception of one cache that we found Friday evening, the caches were good hides. We finished the evening with a pair of caches in the west end that involved trooping through the woods, projecting new waypoints using information on small copper tags. Another team of catchers joined us along the way and when we found the cache we discovered that it was full of little bottles of Coke, which were a welcome treat after our trek through the woods!

Saturday saw me and Nikon-Guy head out to find a bunch of caches in the afternoon, including a series in the south end near Albion and Mitch Owens. At 6pm we stopped by a Chinese food restaurant in Orleans for some take-out and met up with everyone else at the
Legion on Kent Street. It was nice visiting with everyone and we learned that there might be another GAG event in the spring (they’ve been a fall event the last few years).

Kudos to everyone who organised the event and thanks to everyone who hid a cache! TFTC!