The daily Chicken Run and Quality of Life...

I got to work well early this morning. Just as well, really, as the run-out was messed up again.

On Tuesday, none of the buses were 'plated', or assigned; Plating refers to the practice of assigning a running number to a bus, thereby setting it's order in the morning runout from the depot, and it's order in the days schedule of a given bus route once out of the depot. In this case, it seems one of the garage inspectors called in sick, and no-one was available to do the job until the last minute. Sod's law, that. While it meant that buses were first come, first served for the first part of the runout, it did at least have a minimal confusion factor to it. Controlled chaos, if you like.

This morning (Wednesday), it appears that, while he correctly plated them first, the garage run-out inspector arbitrarily decided to re-arrange where, and in what order, each routes' buses would sit prior to being taken out on their first run...

Result? Unorganised Chaos, loosely disguised as Complete Pandemonium! No-one knew where their bus was going to be, or even how they were going to dig it out when they were due to leave first when their bus was at the back of the pile! I was one of the fortunate few who, having come in early, had time to amble round the yard, find my bus, and dig it out to the front in plenty of time, rather than run around in ever-decreasing circles, etc.

For some reason, this got me thinking about quality of life. Not standard of living, but quality of life: The two, while related, are different in scale by many orders of magnitude. We all seem to be conditioned into thinking that monetary income is the key to success. Bull. It's quality of life. You can be poor as a church mouse, and still have quality of life. Money is only part of the equation. It's mainly about, for want of a better phrase, not only smelling the roses, but having the time to smell them, and savour and enjoy the experience. This is what a lot of folks seem to be missing; we rush around like blue-backsided flies, forever chasing the dream, but never realising that it's there for the taking, if only we'd slow down and sniff it out. It's odd. In 26 years of adult life, I only just realised it. And now, I look back, and realise that I lost it, the moment I struck out on my own, and left my parents' home. Like I said, it's odd. Now add a mental shrug of the shoulders: What's done is, after al, done. No point worrying about it too much, after all.

So, how does this relate to buses? For once, I had time to actually do my morning routine at a manageable and easy pace, rather than the more normal running-around-like-a-headless-chicken pace, as is normally the case for pretty-much everyone at our depot in the morning. In a depot where there are some 150 drivers clocking on for work each morning, that's a shedload of headless chickens, as you can imagine.

Strangely, I find that once I've managed to exit London for good, I'm probably going to miss the daily chicken run at work!

Now is that QoL madness, or what?