I’ve had good and bad jobs, but the one that always makes me smile is a job I had in college: driving double-decker buses.
The University of California, Davis, had (and still has) a student-run bus system called Unitrans. It was centered on campus but served the entire city. What made Unitrans unique was its fleet of authentic 1950s red double-decker London buses.
They were finicky beasts: hard to learn but rewarding to master, each with its own personality. Drivers sat up front in a separate cab—naturally on the wrong side of the vehicle, but that wasn’t the tricky part. The tricky part was shifting.
I’m no gearhead so don’t hold me to this, but as I recall they had a manual pre-select pneumatic transmission. This meant that, as you rumbled along preparing to shift from one gear to another, you moved the stick into the next slot without pushing the “gear-change pedal” (not technically a clutch but effectively one), then pumped the pedal to shift gears with a great wheeze of compressed air and, if you knew the temperament of the particular bus you were driving, minimal bucking and lurching.
Because the driver was in the cab, double-deckers needed a conductor in the back to handle fares and passengers. A good driver-conductor team could wordlessly anticipate each other’s moves. It’s not how I met my future wife, Karen, but it is how we passed many hours together.
I think it helped seal the deal. Chicks dig red cars.
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