She’s me but in reverse. Benjamin Bussin’.

Any day I learn some Dutch is a good day.

I’m a school bus driver now and it’s great. I get to drive a big Tonka truck around and gaslight children. Sure, I make about 1/6 of what I used to make as a mobile apps programmer, but at least I get good subsidized health insurance and I only work 5 hours a day.

bevolking

Ok, I see that these letters are next to each other on the keyboard, but … damn.

I had a coworker on one project that took input as short integer values between 0 and 32767. The values conceptually represented min and max values between 0.0 and 1.0, so one day he changed all the parameters to Float, like in hundreds of places. Since the application then wouldn’t compile, he wrapped all the calls via search-and-replace so that the integer parameters were cast to Float and then clamped between 0.0 and 1.0.

Viola! the application then compiled. Unfortunately, this application controlled a baseball-throwing machine capable of 125 mph and he decided to test his new version (for the very first time) on an actual baseball field with Little Leaguers on it. The machine’s first throw was supposed to be a soft ground ball to the shortstop, but was instead a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above the kid’s head. This lead to the only time in my programming career when I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight (between the client and my manager).

It’s funny, I know exactly zero programmers (and this includes myself) who didn’t initially encounter SQL and decide it was clunky and stupid and try writing their own classes to write the SQL for them. I want to think it only took me a few weeks until I understand its actual value and purpose but I’m probably misremembering my past. The worst I ever saw, though, was a coworker who tried writing his own ORM. He had one project with classes named “AND.cs” and “OR.cs”. All they did was take an input string by reference and append " AND " or " OR " to it respectively. I’m sure I never before or since encountered a class that did less work.

Circa 2005 I created a mobile app (for the honest-to-god-that’s-what-MS-named-it “WinCE” OS that later became Windows Mobile) that allowed workers to survey power line networks in the field and indicate all the trees that needed to be trimmed or removed. The app used a local SqlCE database and the workers would upload their recorded data at the end of the day back in their hotel rooms using Remote Data Access, an MS technology which allowed SqlCE databases to “sync” with a master Sql Server database.

It almost always worked flawlessly (100% during development, natch), except for once in a while when synced data would somehow end up in a weirdly corrupted, mangled state on the central server. Like, records that were lacking a primary key value (!), something that is basically impossible to achieve. I opened a ticket with MS support and we went back and forth on this for a few weeks until they basically said “yeah that’s fucked” and recommended that I modify my app to sync the same data multiple times to ensure it made it to the server correctly.

I actually had substantial faith in MS products up to that point (facepalm).

I’m a school bus driver and I got a card at the end of the year from all the kids at one stop. They all signed their names, but one fourth-grade girl added “thank you for driving us from place to place and for making us smile every day. We ♥ you!” I about melted. Much more meaningful than the fucking Panera gift card it came with (I know, I know: never look a gift horse in the microwave).

These kids are all rich as fuck, so it’s not exactly the same as OP’s story.

I’ve long said that the more people you add to a software project, the longer it will take and the worse the final product will be. Your scenario describes one of the many reasons why this is the case.

Not many people know that “Baba Yaga” is the real name of the song, not “Teenage Wasteland”.

the bus is stopped at an intersection or other place controlled by a traffic-control signal

This one seems kinda crazy. Like, are stop signs traffic-control signals? I have many stops at stop sign intersections and it’s not at all unusual for late kids to be sprinting through the intersection to get to the bus. That’s exactly the kind of situation you want cars to be stopping for just in case.

NY has generally slightly weird school bus laws. They require a driver’s side emergency exit door, two swing-out stop signs, seatbelts, and they don’t paint the rub rails black. I have no idea why they have yellow rub rails, makes no sense at all.

No argument here.

Except that’s a rare thing to happen because it’s a serious crime.

Lol it’s not rare at all. I’m a school bus driver and it happens multiple times on each run. It’s not uncommon to have multiple cars pass me at a single stop.

including divided highways in their school bus law

Rural state? Whether or not divided highways make sense depends on whether or not kids are crossing these highways to get to their stops. Seems like that wouldn’t happen anywhere but you never know. In my district (Philly suburb) we design our runs so that kids rarely have to cross any street at all, and never have to cross even just multi-lane roads (let alone divided highways).

FYI I’m a school bus driver and our buses are equipped with these BusPatrol cameras. Our director of transportation told me about the financial arrangement, which I’m not sure most people know about. BusPatrol pays all costs relating to the cameras and their installation. They then get all of the ticket revenue generated ($300 per incident) until the cameras are paid for, after which the company splits the revenue with the school district (my boss told me this is a 50/50 split but Google says it’s about 60/40 in favor of the company). The money that goes to the school district is further split (50/50) between the school system and the police department, who have the responsibility for reviewing the recordings and mailing out the tickets. The “until the cameras are paid for” part is interesting: according to my boss, the installation cost of the cameras for our 40 buses was in the neighborhood of $1.5 million dollars, which seems a bit improbable. $37,500 per camera?

The revenue these things generate has to be fucking enormous. I’ve had runs where I get passed by 10 to 15 cars with my lights on and stop sign out. The main benefit to me personally is lowered stress. I used to get genuinely angry at cars doing this, and I would waste time and attention span horn-blasting them (one time I even had a cop pass me like this, driving with one hand and looking at his cell phone in the other hand). Now I don’t give a shit, knowing that they’re (likely) getting a big ticket for it.

I’m a school bus driver and we have these BusPatrol cameras on our buses. One of my stops in the morning is at a place where a divided highway becomes not-divided. In my state you don’t have to stop for school buses on divided highways, but my stop is about ten feet into the not-divided area. Most people stop anyway but a lot of people don’t. I’ve had people ask me whether they’re supposed to stop or not and I have to tell them that I have no idea. The drivers are not involved with the cameras at all – we don’t make the determination of whether somebody gets a ticket or not and we’re not told anything about how many tickets our cameras are generating.

Klingon don’t cling on.

My joke comment was based on love! I actually started my professional career with VB (3 no less) and it was an excellent language for what it was good for, mainly building good UIs. Sure, it could be – and was – used to create unearthly horrors, but that’s true of every language and platform.

Don’t cry, babe – at least I didn’t say Visual Basic.