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A short, unpleasant ride
I traveled recently to attend an industry conference. My flight was delayed for four hours, which didn't put me in a particularly good mood when I arrived at the destination airport. Things got worse, however, when I tried to get a cab ride to my hotel. There were two taxis waiting at the cab line. By this time it was almost midnight, and there were no other customers in sight. I thought they'd be glad to see some business headed their way.
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Are you my friend or my boss?
Everyone wants to be loved. It's a survival instinct. The more people who love you, and the fewer who hate you, the better the chance that you'll live a long life uninterrupted by attacks on your character and person.
But leaders, such as transportation directors and other managers, aren't in their positions to be loved. They're in their positions to get a job done as efficiently and safely as possible. If they happen to be liked, or loved, by their employees, that's a bonus, but it's not the
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Is workforce diversity an issue?
I read an interesting article in the Houston Chronicle about the difficulty the local transit agency has had in recruiting Hispanic employees. The agency's efforts to bring more Hispanics into its ranks included advertising in the newspaper and on the radio, as well as Spanish-language TV. It also attended job fairs and held its own job fairs. To no avail. In trying to fill 250 spots for bus drivers, it hired 10 Hispanics.
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Chemistry in the bus yard?
Why do we stay at one job longer than others? I've been here at School Bus Fleet Magazine for almost 13 years. The longest I stayed at any previous job was five years or so. Early in my career, I left some jobs after only a year.
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Do you know where your children are?
A recent article in the Baltimore Sun discusses the use of GPS technology to allow parents to track the whereabouts of their children. The reporter engaged the issue by interviewing a mother who bought her 7-year-old daughter a cell phone equipped with a GPS tracking device after the girl was put on the wrong school bus by a substitute teacher.