I’m a school bus driver, and TIFU. This morning, everything felt smooth. I started my route on time, traffic was light, and every stop went off without a hitch. But barely any kids were getting on. It was strange enough that by stop 8 (usually one of my busiest), I asked a few of the regulars who usually chat with me, “Where is everyone today?”
In my mind, I tried to play it off. Maybe there’s a field trip? Maybe school’s doing something special today? I convinced myself it wasn’t me.
Then I got to stop 9, which is always my busiest, and saw kids running for dear life to catch my bus.
That’s when I finally glanced at my wristwatch. I was three and a half minutes early. At that point it all hit me at once.
I had been early to every stop. My bus clock was running fast, and I hadn’t noticed because normally everything just lines up.
So I sat there at stop 9 for three and a half minutes, watching the aftermath of my mistake unfold in real time.
After finishing the route and dropping off the kids, I was driving to take my daughter to her school. That’s when I saw them.
Kids I was supposed to pick up. My kids. Walking along the sidewalk of a major road.
They looked up at the bus as we passed. The expressions weren’t confused or angry. They were haunting. Like they’d been left behind and knew exactly who did it.
And the worst part? So did I.
TL;DR: My bus clock was running fast, so I accidentally showed up 3.5 minutes early to all my stops. I thought everything was just weirdly quiet until I saw kids sprinting to catch the bus at stop 9. Later, I drove past the ones I missed walking to school and got haunting looks of betrayal. I was the villain in their morning.
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Poor kids, hopefully they got to school safely.
Am I really that old? What kid shows up to the bus stop as you’re rolling up? 3.5 minutes early? My parents and all the kids I went to school with parents had us out there 15-20 minutes before. Which was fine because we were gonna shoot the shit or have that one pending fight. But you can’t blame yourself for a fantastic traffic day! Them kids need to be standing by!
This was a good post. haha, poor kiddos.
That’s on the parents. If they aren’t out there 10 minutes early they are late.
Really, how does a bus clock even get that far off, it’s kinda wild, and I guess my sense of time isn’t always great either, so I can sympathize with the OP’s chaotic morning!
The clock on my 2018 blue bird advances itself like 2 minutes every week!
>I was three and a half minutes early.
bich, I arrive at my bus stop 15 minutes early… so I’m not seeing the problem with 3 minutes, I was thinking oh he’s like a hour behind or somethin… 3 minutes? psh
I mean that sucks, but also public transit busses run 5 minutes early and late all the time. Being literally 3.5 mins early shouldn’t be a problem. Also, it takes some time for kids to get on the bus, so if there were kids at the stop at all, it was more like 2 or 3 minutes early, tops.
TLDR – kids were cutting it real close.
Way to go, IRL Otto Mann!
Thanks for the laugh! 😂 Poor kiddos
My paranoid mother made me get to the bus stop at least 20 minutes early every day, rain or shine, snow or no. And up here in Maine, that was brutal.
Why didn’t you go back to pick up the kids you left behind? Did you contact the school or your boss at the bus dispatch company(?) so they could contact the parents or send a second bus?
Shit happens and people make mistakes, something these kids will learn more and more as they grow up, I had a bus I needed to take to get to work from my village to begin the season (small Greek island so work is seasonal) and the driver took the completely wrong route (which we’d called and checked which route it would take the day before) causing me to spend €60 on a taxi to get there on time.
If anything, you just gave the kids the best excuse to be late to school and spend more time chatting to their friends which is something I, and most of my school friends would have killed for back in the day (I was always late but very rarely had a decent excuse).
If you still feel guilty about it, take a bag of sweets or chocolates with you next time you do that route and hand them out to the kids when they get on the bus as an apology, I’m sure they’ll appreciate the gesture.
But try to remember when you were a kid, were you really that eager to get to class or did you just want to hang out with your friends? You made a tiny mistake (and those kids probably learned to always get to their bus stop early because buses are rarely reliable at the best of times), so honestly, don’t sweat it.
Nothing worse as a kid than trying to catch the bus, at 7am. I was lucky and there was a culdesac it went into right after my stop, so I could sprint full speed to manage to catch it, sometimes. But 3.5 minutes early? Damn, I wouldn’t have had a chance xD
At least you feel bad about it. My junior high school bus driver was often early (or late) for pickups, occasionally skipped stops…
She just did NOT give a single fuck about doing that job well.
in our school district the kids are supposed to be outside five minutes early. there are a lot of variables like traffic, weather, and kids that might not be riding today for various reasons that can change times. now that the weather is nice, my elementary schooler and i make it out ten or fifteen minutes early just to enjoy the sunshine and play with the dog.
the same goes in the afternoon, a parent/caretaker/older sibling is supposed to be outside to pick younger children up five minutes before the scheduled time, otherwise they don’t let them off the bus if someone isn’t standing there to get them. if they get there a couple minutes early, you’re already there and it’s not a snafu.
Maybe start your post with the fact that you’re a bus driver
I was driving as a substitute driver for a while and during my pre route inspection I always checked the clock and 99% of the time had to set the time. The regular driver would notice a few days later and thank me 😂
Now I’m wondering if you’re our kids bus driver.
I work in a school and know the ridiculousness of being held to the minute picking up children. I know I sound old but damn we used to get to our bus stop 20 minutes early, just to chat with our friends and make sure we didn’t miss the bus that was coming around sooner or later.
Sounds like tomorrow is going to be sticker distribution day to try and make it up to the kiddos.
3.5 minutes??? That’s just normal variation. Where I live, we’re told that if the bus comes within 10 minutes before/after the scheduled time, it was on time.
When I rode the school bus, there wasn’t no particular time for her to turn up. We all just went out early and socialized until it did.
You should have run the route again from the beginning
Im not familiar with that system, but did the kids have some other way to get to school? Did you just YOLO’d them and said my job here is done?
The fact this is gnawing at you this much is why I suspect you’re a good bus driver and a good person. Live and learn…and apologize. 😉👍
i genuinely have never laughed out this loud because of a reddit post thank u OP
thats why my mom said we should be 10 mins earlier in everything.. just in case your case happens.. lol.
It’s the kid whose parents might punish them for missing the bus when it wasn’t their fault. OP, can you give them a note?
Sounds like those kids learned an important life lesson today. Five minutes early is on time. On time is late. Better lace up them walkin shoes, Baelyn.
It sucks, but it happens. I followed the school bus up my road the other day and they were almost 5 minutes early. There were a lot of empty stops and sprinting kids that day.
>TL;DR: My bus clock was running fast, so I accidentally showed up 3.5 minutes early to all my stops.
To be honest, this is a FU from all the kids (and their parents) on your route rather than yours. They should not be getting to the bus stop within a minute or two of when the bus is scheduled to arrive. Unless you are in an area where it is dangerous to be outside for more than 5 minutes (e.g. high crime rate, extreme temperatures, etc) then they should be aiming to be out there with 5 minutes to spare…
Sounds like some kiddos are getting a donut peace offering on the bus tomorrow
Check out Japan’s long history of accurate train schedules and the drivers’ watches. There’s a special place on every train’s dashboard to hold an accurate timepiece.
Seiko Railway Watches
Edit: You could make this an educational moment for the kids, and maybe get back in their good graces, by telling them about this and doing something similar.
My ADHD kid would have missed it. No matter how early she is ready and how early she leaves, she dawdles and looks at things and makes it to the bus stop with 60 seconds to spare every single day
That’s why kids shouldn’t go to the stop right at the time, I was always at the bus stop with 10-15 minutes to spare.
So you’re going to bring apology candy or toys or something with you tomorrow right?
You have made a visible mistake in front of children.
Be the one who reinforces “adults make mistakes sometimes, and we try to make up for it”
rather than “adults make mistakes sometimes, but we don’t care about the people we inconvenienced”.
Well it does suck for the kids, but on the other hand it sounds like several kids just learned to not wait till the last minute to show up.
three-and-half minutes? my kid’s bus has a solid five-to-seven minute window. But one time a substitute driver swung by ten minutes early and from the opposite direction than the standard driver’s route. So we called and the company made the driver go back and get the missed kids.
I had a bus driver who straight up drove the bus route wrong one day and didn’t pick up our stop. The bus only had 3 stops and one of them had 2 people, so I don’t know how they managed to fuck that up. Bus drivers, man.
I appreciate how much you care!
At least you weren’t driving a Patriot missile.
>It turns out that the cause was an inaccurate calculation of the time since boot due to computer arithmetic errors. Specifically, the time in tenths of second as measured by the system’s internal clock was multiplied by 1/10 to produce the time in seconds. This calculation was performed using a 24 bit fixed point register. In particular, the value 1/10, which has a non-terminating binary expansion, was chopped at 24 bits after the radix point. The small chopping error, when multiplied by the large number giving the time in tenths of a second, led to a significant error. Indeed, the Patriot battery had been up around 100 hours, and an easy calculation shows that the resulting time error due to the magnified chopping error was about 0.34 seconds.
Our bus driver is new this year & made his own schedule for stops. We have the same “missed bus” issue every time there’s a sub who sticks to the original route. We are never notified when there is a sub, so we’re always at the bus stop for an extra 10 minutes bc on the original route we’re earlier.
Our drivers would have gone back to get them or the supervisor would have sent other buses to pick up the kids. We wouldn’t have let them walk.
I think this happened to my bus driver the other day. He was roughly 10 minutes early for every stop.
Our kids used to take a school bus to the other side of the island in the Cook Islands.
The pickup time kept getting earlier and earlier. It turned out the driver did not have a watch or clock and just got up when the roosters crowed at sunrise and started his school run. The local kids did the same so it was just us poor clock bound people that kept almost missing the bus.
Wait if you saw them and you’re in your bus why didn’t you pick them up and correct the mistake?
That is amazing.
I can imagine the kids having the same expressions as the characters in Attack on Titan
Your school doesn’t have an app? Our school provides an app to all parents that show the buses along their routes and even lets you check if there’s a delay getting to school. There was a wreck a few weeks back, and the app notified parents there was a delay, a minor fender bender and that all students were fine.
But why didn’t you circle back to the other stops and get the kids? I don’t understand why you couldn’t radio in to base to tell them that you needed to go back to pick up kids because you were accidentally early. Does your bus have a radio to call the bus garage? I’m confused because anytime I am early I circle back to get the other kids who usually show up later to the stop. My company even had a rule where if you show up to a stop and you’re missing a lot of kids you wait two minutes before driving off and we radio in if we have no pickups. I hope all the kids made it to school safely
I felt like I was going to have a stroke reading that title.
Damn this just brought back a memory.
My dad had an F350 when I was in middle school. It sounded exactly like a bus. He didn’t have time to take us to school, but he would at least drive us to the bus stop. We’d start making our way down the street and you’d see front doors flying open and children spilling out with backpacks and coats flapping, only to stop when they noticed my dad’s black truck. 😂
Guess you’re bringing candy tomorrow?
Our district policy is you have to be out waiting at your stop 5-7 minutes before your stop time. We try to be on time but if we are up to 5 minutes early the. They should have been out there waiting.
That’ll teach ’em. if you’re not early, you’re late.
Glad my kids school system uses a herecomesthebus app and I just track where it is.
Her bus comes at 8:03 and I always have daughter ready to leave by 7:55 as I drive her up there. But the app is nice to have in case it’s late. Hasn’t been more than a minute early yet from what I remember but she’s about the last stop.
But when I was going to school I was always there 5 mins early because Ive had to run across the whole neighborhood to catch bus before when I missed it as it took a weird route that took it way back deep in the neighborhood but still had to come back out to a stop I could make it to if I ran.
Wow! My kids school requires kids to be ready at least 5 minutes early though our particular bus is often 10 plus minutes late.
It’s incredible that you are usually so on time!! Students at my school prepare for the bus to be there pretty much anytime within a 30 minutes window! Thank you for your consistency!
That really sucks but gotta say shit happens and makes me sympathise with bus drivers more. Idk how you hit your times anyways
All those kids are going to be showing up 5-10 min early for everything from now on , you may have actually done them a favor
Honestly, screw the kids. You gotta get to the stop earlier than exactly on time. “On time is late and 5 minutes early is on time” was drilled into me in school by several teachers. Kids today (parents) suck.
Welp. Guess they’ll be early to the bus stop from now on lol. 3.5 minutes is really not much. I would always be 15 minutes early at least
Honestly, that’s partially on the kids / parents as well. Who is going to the bus stop on the very second it’s supposed to be there? When I was a kid we were out there like 15-20 minutes early so we could squeeze in some football throwing or something. Wild to me to think someone would wait that close to time and blame anyone but themselves
It’s surprising that so many people get to their bus stop with less than 3.5 minutes to wait. I’m always 5 mins early unless something comes up, then I’m usually late.
If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. If you’re late, there’s no excuse.
3.5 minutes… When I was in school, we were told to be at the stop 10-15 minutes early. I will admit to being bad at time management, so I did get out less than five minutes early sometimes, but when I missed the bus it wasn’t because the bus was early but because I wasn’t. It sucks for today, but this could be a good life lesson for some of these kids: if you schedule things so a single issue will make you late, you will inevitably be late sometimes. Always try to be 5-10 minutes early.
At least you waited once you realized. Our kids’ morning bus sometimes runs early and never tries to get back on the correct schedule.
it’s not a FU when it’s character building. trust no one! question everything! it’s a dog eat dog world out there, kids.
Naw, no big deal. You’re teaching them life lessons. Always show up 10-15mins prior.
It’s not like you were 15 minutes early. Our school district tells us to be sure to arrive 5-10 min early. If they’re rolling up within 3 minutes…lesson learned.
I was always at the bus stop 5 minutes early, because I hated missing the bus and it’s not the bus drivers job to take notes for attendance. I wouldn’t feel bad about it at all, our bus driver told us to be there five minutes early or she’d leave us.
I was always at least 5-7 minutes early for the bus, usually closer to 10 minutes. The only times I made sure I was right on time were when it was miserably cold out and standing out there would have been dangerous.
I think i box of candy will patch up the relations
I dunno, but I kind of feel like getting to the bus stop any less than 5 minutes before the bus is actually due is already a rookie mistake.
My bus was always super inconsistent growing up. So the general rule was to show up 20-30 minutes before the scheduled time. Sometimes the bus showed up then, sometimes the bus showed up 30 minutes past the scheduled time. Looking back, I genuinely wonder how that guy kept his job. He did some sketchy stuff too.
Nah, we were always at bus stop 15-20 minutes early. One place I sometimes walked 30 min along a dirt road to get to the bus stop, and it was the only bus into town. Made sure I got there in time. Hated that walk too
Those kids were ok, as long as the road had a footpath 🙂
If I were in school and missed the bus because it was 3 minutes early I would have blamed myself and not the bus driver honestly. I didn’t even know what exact time the bus came, I just knew I should be out there a few minutes early just in case. Don’t beat yourself up about it too much, shit happens!
You’d have been my hero
You taught the kids a lesson. Arrive 10 minutes early to everything
When I was in high school, the bus route involved passing in front of my house circuitously before getting to the stop maybe 500 m away from me in about 2 min.
I always lazily waited until I saw the bus before I would SPRINT to the bus stop with my backpack on. Not sure why I never left before that. I suppose I was always lazy and would be eating. The bus driver would always slow down to about 10 km/hr if he saw I was struggling and 30 seconds behind lol.
Why aren’t the kids outside waiting before the bus is due? Are they just walking out of their house when they see the bus pull up? Schools in our area tell us to be outside 10 minutes before the scheduled time.
As I get older and think of this as a “retirement job”…I have already had your nightmare. Early, late missed pickups. I can’t…I don’t know how you do it.
Our bus driver was 10 minutes early one time thankfully our stop is right in front of our house but as I’m yelling at my eight year old to hurry hurry she was definitely starting to hyperventilate. Poor girl. I asked my driver if she changed the time and I missed it and she’s like no, I was just early… Lol. Thankfully she hasn’t done that again. You’re doing fine the kids should be more on time.
This seems like an insane expectation of precision timing on the part of kids. If my or my kid’s bus is scheduled for 7:30, you best believe I’m actively watching starting at 7:25 at the latest.
Uhh, why didn’t you just stop to pick them up when you saw them?
I wouldn’t worry about it because honestly if it was only 3.5 minutes then they should have been out there already seriously
If those parents aren’t getting their kids out there at least 3.5 mins before you are scheduled to arrive, they are fucking assholes.
Poor planning on their part does not constitute an emergency (nor fuckup) on your behalf.
Three minutes?? Our buses have a 30 minute window they show up in…
Can you bring an apology candy dish next time? That’s so rough for all of you lol
I always got to my bus stop really early. I would not of even noticed a 3 minute time difference..
Who isn’t at a bus stop 5-10min early🤨 sounds like a good life lesson for the kids lol
Wow! To think you even care that much is amazing! Thank you for caring!
You should have gone back and picked up the missed kids.
Why didn’t you stop and pick them up?
Where I live my kids need to be at the bus 10 minutes early per bus company policy. There should be a policy put into place for your company too.
Reminds me of when I was a teenager my bus driver drove past me without stopping and made eye contact with me and to this day I wonder wtf was going on when she did that lol