Greyhound Boot Camp

Yes. There is such a thing...

or, there used to be.

These days, Greyhound driver candidates get most of their primary training from a computer program. Yes, there is some hands-on (later), but first, you take an on-line course with several modules. I never understood the logic of this, and I still don't like it. On a computer, even in the video vignettes, buses are clean and defect free, the drivers are sharp and crisp, passengers are smiling and content, the eighteen wheeler your bus is passing is doing the speed limit and not drifting into your lane, the road is perfectly paved and skies are blue...

It's not the real world.

All this new training comes before you even see a Driver Training School (or DTS). When I started, if you passed muster, you went straight to Driver Training School. Four weeks of hell. There were several back in the mid- 1990s, Richmond, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, and Reno. I went to the school in Reno.

There were eight of us from Albuquerque that went to DTS. Seven of us returned, and five plugged the board (plugging the board is when you have sucessfully qualified as a driver and are officailly placed on the roster and the payroll). All told, 100 candidates came to school in the Western Division. Less than 50 completed the training. 32 plugged the board. That's pretty average. Many think they want to try the job, later to find out the lifestyle is not for them. Others simply want to get a CDL license and learn how to drive a bus. Then, there are some...only God knows why they were there.

"As a Student you experience an intense four weeks of classroom instruction and behind-the-wheel training at one of our national training locations.

Greyhound provides transportation, room accommodations, meals (breakfast and lunch), professional instructors and a per day stipend.

You will arrive on a Sunday. Classes begin on Monday morning. As a top performer you will pass a closed skills course, complete all classroom assignments, demonstrate proficiency on driver logs, display excellent customer service skills and prove your abilities on the open road. You log over 40-hours of driving time and successfully meet these challenges with an attitude of professionalism in both behavior and dress.

Greyhound is looking for the best. The best progress to Finishing School!"

So, on a early Monday morning (I'm sorry - 7:30 AM is early to me), about 100 of us shuffled into a makeshift classroom that had once upon a timetable been a large cafeteria and were instructed to take a seat and not touch anything on our desks. Each desk had several forms and policies (face down), along with two course books. Several driver instructors stood stone-faced around the room. At 8 AM, the fun started. The head instructor introduced himself and nodded towards the other instructors. About twenty students were fingered and asked to leave the room. We would never see them again. They committed the unforgivable sin of not following instruction. The other driver instructors wached silently as they fingered the material on their desk that they were told NOT to touch. The process of elimination is a cruel mistress. 20 down, more to go.

The head instructor introduced himself, a larger-than-life Okie named Gary. Gary was a likable person to begin with, but over my years of driving Greyhound, he became a real bastard. I'm sure he was a joy to live with, and perhaps ther was a huge sigh of relief whenever he left home to go on the road. Gary taught classroom. The best way to get through Gary's class was to be visible, but silent, nod on occasion, and realize that if Gary gave you a ten minute break, it meant ten minutes.

The course was divided into two halves. Half of the class did classroom, while the other half went out on the range. One day, you'd be in class, the next, you were out driving or doing hands-on with the actual bus. 26 buses were pulled from service to be training buses. The number dwindled over time. Students practiced in pairs under the watchful eye of an instructor. Over time, training started in a closed parking lot at the local fairgrounds, and progressed to the streets of Sparks, NV and stretches of I-80 nearby. A time-honored ritual at the Rno Driving School was to make the students drive out to the old Mustang Ranch and drive circles around the parking lot until some of the 'working girls' came out and waved. I'm sure the people running the brothel tired of this, but tollerated it every few weeks. Oh, did I mention that mostly all the driver trainers were men? We had one female driver trainer, and I think her perpetual role was mother hen to any other female driving students (our class had 10, maybe). Otherwise, it was a "boys club". Greyhound was, is and will always be a "boys club".

When I went through training, it was right after the nastiest strike that Greyhound ever suffered. Four years, and even then, much never got resolved until 1995/96. Much of the discussion during class and out on the range was about the strike...who came back, who got killed (yes, people died -- got shot or run over by buses), who didn't come back, and who the scabs are. Greyhound hired many replacements during the strike. Ideally, those replacements would have left after the strike. Sadly, not only did they stay on, but they gained seniority! At Greyhound, seniority is a valuable commodity. We were all urged to join the union. Few didn't. More students were dropped from the program (guess why). Not only did I sign up and get a working card, a year and a half in, I was the local union rep.

I'm no fool.

Four weeks of learning space/time distance, hand over hand steering, tickets, baggage handling, driver's logs, tally cards, ticket envelopes, dispatch, pretrips, post trips, brake tests, and countless other ins and outs, less than 50 of us graduated out of Reno DTS.

Or should I say boot camp?

The adventure starts...

The Greyhounder