Today was the last day of school, and this means that after our routes today and again tomorrow we get to clean the interior of our buses. Yea. 9 months of stinky, dirty, sloppy kids on the buses, and with the exception of sweeping out buses a few times a week, we don't do much to really clean the inside of the buses. Honestly, they are kinda gross. I do more than most drivers, windexing the inside of the windows 2-3 times a year, but the moment they get fogged up, combined with all the dusty we raise up, and then dirty fingers drawing pictures of penises and screaming 'HELP ME', they are just as nasty as they had been before.
This is the third year in which I have done this job, and so my first job each year is to clean the space between the seat and the wall. This doesn't sound so bad until you realize that many of these children are used to stuffing their trash down into the cracks of their couches, and this is little different. So for almost an hour, you scrub out the candy, the wrappers, the pens, the occasional coins (18c today!), and almost anything else. And your hands are just covered with a black goop by the time you are done, it's so nasty.
After taking a well-deserved hygiene break, you then get down on your hands and knees and with a small broom sweep out the cracks and nooks of the floor to get all the dust off; eventually, you sweep everyhing towards the front of the bus, pick up the large pieces of debris, and then eventually sweet the dust and hair and other unknown into the wind. This ought to be an EPA violation, but somehow it's fallen through the cracks.
Then there's the wiping down every interior surface for germs...ceiling, seats, ledges, wheel wells, etc. There's cleaning each window. There's the fun exercise of hanging on for dear life while trying to get all the bug goop off the front of the bus. There's taking the shop vac to the area around the drivers' seat. There's getting wet wipes out to clean the various cables, knobs, dashboards, and anything else up front. There's opening up all the undercarriages and spraying 9 months worth of south-central Kansas county road dust. And then, after yet another sweeping, there's a mopping of the floor.
It's all really kinda sickening, but bus driving has never been the most glamorous of jobs. I don't know that I've ever heard of any prestige bus drivers, who have a whole cleaning crew up to take care of any spills and messes. If there were, maybe I'd be a bit more proud, though, and so my God givesi me the job of cleaning up the stink of our town's best and brightest.
