She gives an insight into the team effort it takes to keep a bus on the road – a team who pulled together through the pandemic.
“My favourite part of my job is the variety.
I like how you can see so many different types of people travel by bus and it acts as such a snapshot of society.
You get such a blend of people and personalities! From the reasons that they’re travelling; be it going to work, going to see their mum, going shopping, meeting friends! It will be nice when we return to bus and people can get back to the things that they love doing. I’ve always wanted to work in marketing. So for me, this is kind of where I would want to be. This is a bit of a dream job, but I suppose if I didn’t do this, I would love to run a cake shop or something. I love baking so I’d probably go the complete opposite way.
We get some lovely feedback about our staff and our drivers and I think it’s just humanity shining through. Things like: A driver who pulled over the bus and helped someone cross the road with their shopping because they saw they were struggling as they drove past.
And we hear of lovely stories from the drivers, too. During lockdown some children painted signs for display at local bus stops that read ‘thank you bus drivers’. We also saw a lot of families take their daily walks, and as part of that the children would stop and wave at the bus driver as they passed.
There’s so many little snippets like that that we receive that just completely brighten up your day, because you just think it gives you a bit of faith that people are nice and that good things happen even when the news might be otherwise very bleak.
We saw a lot of that during the pandemic, I think people could really appreciate that our drivers are key workers too and they were going to work every day to make sure everyone else could get to where they needed to be. Beyond the drivers, we have incredible operations teams and our engineering departments across Scotland who were still working day and night to make sure those essential journeys could run.
There is a huge amount of combined effort from so many departments to get a bus on the road every day, and those departments pulled together during a difficult year.
