“It’s cool, we’re just here for the skittles. You can have all the reese’s peanut butter cups.”

Some school districts will train you for the CDL, and some even pay you while you’re training (mine didn’t at the time). My training didn’t take very long because I already owned a used school bus and knew how to drive it, at least. You have to take four standardized tests (general CDL, airbrakes, passenger endorsement and school bus endorsement), have a driving exam, and take a 14-hour special school bus class (this is all in PA, at least). The standardized tests aren’t super-difficult, but you do have to actually know the shit, you can’t guess your way through it and hope to get a passing grade. I just crammed the free online tests over and over until I was getting 100% on them. I think it was maybe a month and a half between when I started my training and my first day on the job, but that was with not doing a whole lot each day. My district was (and still is) a weird combination of desperate need for drivers with a frustratingly slow pace of actually training people.

I have a class C. I wouldn’t bother with a class B unless I actually needed it.

I was a programmer for 25-some years but I haven’t written a line of code since 2019. I now get my engineering jollies from the used school bus I converted to a motorhome and from the house I bought three years ago and am finishing up renovating. For money I drive a school bus, which pays about 1/6 of what I used to make but is infinitely more satisfying. As far as retirement goes, I’m hoping to die a painless death before AI replaces all the CDL jobs in the country. I think AI will work fine for school buses, mainly because kids are easier to replace the younger they are.

The house I bought three years ago has those fake wood gray planks in the living room. I deliberately left the floor uncovered during renovation on the assumption that it would be destroyed and I’d have to replace it with something I actually like. Unfortunately, that shit is indestructible.

Oh, that’s probably what it was. Oh well, Musk is still a douchebag.

When I was a kid in the '70s there were cigarette vending machines everywhere. If you wanted to smoke, you could smoke.

I’m old enough to remember coming home from bars with my clothes reeking, even though I never smoked myself.

I’m a school bus driver and a majority of my colleagues smoke. Some things will never change.

That Dorothy Hamill cut was the shit.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said “ELON”. I dunno, maybe ELON stands for something else. It was stuck on the back of a Chrysler, ironically enough.

Ya Mama

Take the bird’s eye view.

I had this idea for a sci-fi short story that involved a long-lived alien that has been watching the earth since the solar system formed. It finally decides to speak to humanity and starts telling the story about how the earth formed from the collision of two bodies, and the humans are all “yeah yeah we know. Here’s a movie we made of it” and the alien is all “WTF? How do they know that?”

Mozart also invented a system that used dice to randomly generate music. My unverifiable theory is that he continued refining the system and it got so good that he used it to compose all his greatest hits and stopped telling anybody about his random music generator.

Jeopardy just depresses me now. I used to think I could have at least competed on the show, but for the last 20 years or so I’ve been completely disconnected from pop culture and I could never hope to answer that type of question. I also miss Trebek, god damn it. Ken Jennings is alright but it’s not just the same.

The evil truth of sourdough is that it takes about the same amount of time and effort to make four loaves as it does to make one.

It’s hilarious that people blame boomers and nepotism for the problems of the world without seeing the contradiction.

The programming is pretty fucking bleak, too. My elderly parents have cable TV and I try to watch it sometimes to entertain myself while I’m taking care of them, and I can’t find a fucking thing worth watching despite them having 500 channels or so. I always end up watching Beat Bobby Flay on the Food Channel and I can’t stand that fucking show.

I never notice when a user or a thread comes from ml until I say something that is real-world uncontroversial like “Stalin had some people murdered” and get flamed for it. I’ve never really felt the need to block servers on Lemmy but ml sure makes me think about looking up how to do it.

You leave Visual Basic alone!