Brrrrr

I like school bus driving. I really do. Okay, the pay is lousy, but I like the job.

But there is one aspect of it I hadn't foreseen, and which at times makes that old office job seem awfully inviting: cold.

Cold, as in 14 degrees Fahrenheit.*

Which is what it was the other morning, when I arrived to prepare my bus for the day's schedule. Of course, that was before dawn, but dawn didn't bring much help; the thermometer reached only to 28 by the afternoon.

Worse, the heater in my bus is anemic. Running full blast, it didn't raise the inside temperature enough to make me think I could remove my gloves until the final run of the day, and it didn't feel even vaguely comfortable until I had dropped off my last kid for the day. And no, I never removed my parka. I was chilly all day. Very chilly.

I know, it could be worse. I could be our roving mechanic, working all day outside (and often under buses trying to thaw out frozen brake lines, or swinging a wrench to replace a frozen stop sign actuator). Or have any one of a number of other jobs that require one to be outdoors all day in all types of weather.

On the other hand, I could be in an office, where cold days mean 72 F (and hot, 78). Has a nice sound to it, y'know? Granted, back then I worked for a malevolent tyrant whose only saving grace was blinding incompetence. But I never came home chilled to the bone ....


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* Yes, I could say -10 Celsius, and Celsius really does makes a lot more sense. But using a positive number makes it sound warmer, or at least not quite so cold. And 28 definitely sounds better than minus two. The time to go metric is the summer, when 40 Celsius sounds so much better than 104.