Short Turns, a blog about driving the bus by a newly minted operator | Just a Gwai Lo
Lot of inside tidbits, as well as a short note at the very beginning about the difference between a “driver” and “operator”.
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This is the ex-bus driver
Michael Cox — Mon, 2009-02-16 07:41
This is the ex-bus driver here, the guy whose blog got him fired. First of all, thank you all for your kind words. I am the one who deleted the blog, on the morning I was called in to explain it and myself I decided (and it was not an easy or quick decision) to delete it to save my job. I had been notified only the afternoon before, a Thursday, that there was to be a meeting with my union reps and management about the blog, that the company had serious issues with it. After a sleepless night, and realizing I was in trouble (but never thinking I’d be fired for it: after all, they hadn’t even given me a warning) I dumped it from wordpress.com.
So then after the meeting and my letter of termination (delivered across the table two hours after the meeting), I regretted deleting the blog, but I really have no interest in resurrecting it, as it was specifically about BEING a bus driver and seeing transit issues from the INSIDE, and now that I am, like most of you, an outsider, I can simply write about it in other blogs or letters to the editor, etc.
Short Turns was never meant to slag the company, although I certainly was critical of some things they did. Yes, I was naive in thinking I could do this as a probationary employee, but I also am a very straunch supporter of free speech (but not of hate literature or speech), and I didn’t feel anything I wrote on my blog was any more damaging to the company than what Pete McMartin, for instance, in the Vancouver Sun, wrote, or others.
From the Metro front page I was treated, if that’s the right word, to a mini-lesson in media attention, which was really illuminating: interviewed by phone on the 94.5fm Kid Carson morning show, then filmed on Broadway by Global for their six o’clock news, then interviewed by phone for a Province article, then the following day live in studio with Christy Clark of CKNW, where I took some tough callers, some of whom felt I deserved what I got.
Maybe I did. I can’t speak for the company, but if I had been a manager there, I would have brought this employee in, talked to him about why “we” didn’t like some aspects of the blog, and asked him to delete or amend some entries, cool his jets, etc. and explain that his job was on the line: in other words, give him a second chance. They chose not to do that and the resulting bad publicity for them sits, egg-like, on their faces. But I don’t expect they really care: this is truly a tempest in a teapot and it has already become “yesterday’s news.”
And so, onward to other things, other challenges. I won’t be engaging in a conversation about this. I’m tired of it, want to move on, have more important things now to do (i.e. find work).
All the best to all of you and thanks Richard for keeping this issue going a bit and for your emails.
Michael Cox