I Know What You Did Last Winter
Greetings! My name is Chris. I am 20 years old currently attending Uni to get a degree in Mathematics. However, over the summer I clean school buses. This blog is a photo account of how dirty and disgusting these buses can get over a school year.
Be Warned that images may contain material one could find unsettling. It is suggested not to view while eating.
Though for the most part, they aren't that bad. I hope you find this informative, and inspires you to take better care of public transportation vehicles, no matter the condition. I'm always open to comments, questions, or ideas!! Just leave them in my ask box.
Thank you, and have a wonderful day!
Chris
Castiel
"This might be a silly question, but how do you remember the names of each bus? Do you associate the bus number with the name, or do the buses have slight differences that you remember?"
Asked by digitalfare
No, it’s not a silly question. :) The names originally came from the licence plates. In Colorado, our standard license plate contains three numbers followed by three letters, well for some of the buses the three letters would either create a name of their own, or I would just make one up for them based on the three letters. It started with a bus who’s license plate ended with “JEN”, so naturally she became Jenny. Then slowly I started giving names to all the buses like this. However, some of the buses were given names for other reasons.
My Dad is actually the first person to name a bus. We have a little handicap bus that my Dad named “Scooter”, and my Dad also named our activity bus, which only goes out on activity trips, “Brutus”…which was the name of his beloved dog which passed away several years ago.
I also have named some of the buses after television characters and such…naturally. :P So we have Anna and Castiel, named after the angels that appeared in Supernatural. And I named a bus Jethro, not after Jethro Gibbs from NCIS, but Jethro the character Colin Morgan played in the Doctor Who episode “Midnight”. :D
Now, I remember most of the names because of the whole licence plate bit, but for the ones that are named special, yes we do have numbers on all the buses so I can associate the names with numbers, but I also had a decal made of the names for every bus and put it on. :P Which you can see one in my latest post. However, when trying to remember names from the pictures, I just have to go on subtle differences I can remember, or maybe some key element of trash…which is sort of sad. I honestly don’t know if I got these all 100% correct, but I’ll be double checking when I go to work on Monday, and make changes if need be. :)
Achmed
Ralph - Seat Close-Ups
Sorry for not keeping up with this project here recently. I’ve still been taking photos and coming up with ideas, just haven’t gotten to the point of putting them up yet. So hopefully I’ll be back later and I’ll be able to queue some posts to go up during the week. :)
Ahh yes, I should have mentioned that a couple years ago I went around and named all the school buses for my district. So I’ll be using these names to keep track of the buses, and hopefully help you guys that are viewing, too. ;)
Brutus: A shot of all the trash that was swept up in Brutus. This is definately not all of it; more trash seems to come out throughout the process.
Items of Interest:
Condom, Half-eaten Arby’s burger, spilled pasta-soup-something.
Introduction
Greetings!
My name is Chris and I’m a 20 year old University student currently studying to become a Mathematician (specialty yet to be decided). However, over the summer I have a job cleaning the school buses of my local school district back home. Now, when I say “clean” I don’t just mean the exterior. Not only do I wash the outside of all the buses, but I remove the seats, sweep trash out from the seats and floor, remove all the gum stuck under the seats, wash out the interior floor, dewax the floor, rewax the floor, clean the ceiling, and clean the windows.
The process usually takes 2-3 days; not due to how dirty the bus is or by how much has to get done, but more because some of the steps (such as washing the interior and waxing the floor) need time to dry before I can move on to the next step. However, I’ll also usually clean two buses at a time so that while one is drying out, I can be starting on the next.
This “blog” was created to simply show you random peoples of the internet what this process does, and also to show the kind of mess you’ll find on a school bus, for most people have no idea. I’ll be taking pictures of before and after to show not only how the bus looks before I really start, but also what they look like after I’m done. Also, at the end of the summer, the district will be using this blog to show the drivers of these buses exactly the kind of mess their kids make during the year.
Now, I could take tons of pictures of the before from various points in the process, but I don’t want to flood this blog with a ton of pictures that look essentially the same. So I’ll be trying to take pictures of things that stand out. Also, every time I clean out a bus, there is bound to be some “items of interest”. These are items that just rise above all the others in terms of oddity, grossness, or hilarity. So I’ll be keeping track of these items as I find them so that I can post that, too.
My goal is simply to show people how disgusting it is to stuff that wrapper down the seat because “it can’t do no harm”. I’m hoping this encourages people to think before they act and realize that there is someone that has to clean up these vehicles. Above all, I’m just hoping that people can come away from this blog and just realize that it’s not that hard to throw your trash away in the trash can.
I’ll be starting this little project today! So hopefully I’ll start having pictures today to share! Oh, and I should share that my boss likes to throw the hard stuff at me first, so we get to start off this little adventure with some of the ugliest. The hope is that they get better, but somehow that doesn’t tend to work out. ;)
If you have any questions, comments, or ideas, I’m always welcome to those through my ask box!! I’d love to hear from people and what their thoughts are after visiting.
Thank you for reading, and for visiting!! And I’ll be back later! ;)
Cya,
Chris
