Work As Directed

WAD (Work as Directed) sometimes shows up on my day's schedule. This means for the time specified, no route driving has been assigned. The amount of time assigned is typically a few hours but can vary from a whole day to as little as 4 minutes.

When the whole day is WAD it means I am a 'spare' driver, available to do routes normally belonging to drivers who are off sick. Once I had a start time of 11 AM but I was phoned at home and asked to start earlier in order to take over the entire day's work of another driver.

The 4 minutes WAD I had once was the result of the rule that drivers are paid for at least 7 hours of work per day. The 4 minutes was to fill the gap.

A driver doing WAD is required to write their name and WAD time on a scheduled in the DI's (Depot Inspector's) office and wait in the depot (typically the meal room) to be called over the public address system,

If the WAD time is less than about 2 hours it is not practical to do any route driving because of the time it takes to drive from the depot, do the route and return to the depot. In these cases, other tasks can be assigned. Some of the tasks I have done while doing WAD:
- nothing;
- took an administration staff member to a local shopping mall (I assume for business reasons). I drove her in a bus to the mall, waited for her and drove her back to the depot;
- closed the windows of the buses in the depot parking lot. The old buses are not air conditioned and have opening passenger windows and roof hatches. Drivers are supposed to close these when returning the depot but many don't. It was about to rain so the Depot Inspector as me to ensure they were closed;
- drove a bus to replace a bus which was defective in service (the passenger bell wasn't working). This meant driving to an agreed meeting point, exchanging buses with the driver and driving the defective bus back to the depot;
- driving a bus to replace a broken down bus. The other driver took the bus I came in to continue his run. I waited in the defective bus until a mechanic arrived to fix the bus. I returned to the depot the mechanic had driven.

On Friday and Saturday nights there are some 'Night Owl' rosters. These typically start from around 5 PM and finish after 2 AM. An hour or 2 of WAD time is build into the schedule so the driver can have a nap.

Allocating Buses

There are 3 factors which determine which bus is allocated to a driver.

First, some routes have tight turns so require a short wheel based bus. At the Burwood depot this means a Mercedes bus. Second, some routes are advertised in the published schedules as using buses which have wheel chair access. At the Burwood depot this means one either the Volvo B10
or Volvo B12. These 2 options are mutually exclusive as none of the short wheel based buses have wheel chair access. There are many routes where the type of bus is not important so any bus can be allocated.

The third factor is due to the fact that the buses are parked so tightly in the depot parking area over night that the ‘outside’ buses have to be allocated first. This factor takes lower priority to the first 2 so the buses must be parked in a manner that the first 2 factors can be satisfied.

There is a computer generated bus allocation schedule. This contains, amongst other things (*), the name of the driver, the type of bus and the time of departure. The listing is in time of departure sequence. A ‘shed driver’ (the people responsible for organising the buses in the depot) hand writes the bus number (and, usually, the location of the bus in the depot parking lot) next to the driver’s name. The driver (is supposed to) sign the schedule to acknowledge receiving the bus.

This process happens twice a day as drivers return to the depot for their meal break.

(*) The schedule also contains the number of kilometres the bus will run. Curiously, this number is expressed to 3 decimal places - a metre. Changing lanes will add more than this to the distance. A driver will typically drive 100-120km in a day.