Are bus drivers actually paid?

The system-relevant profession of bus driver, one of the few service activities that are not recognised as such, is an example that makes one wonder who came up with the idea of including them in the course of applauding tireless helpers. There is probably no other person sitting on a driver's throne who looks so grumpy from the first time they get on the working vehicle until they stamp off at the depot in the evening. It doesn't matter whether it's a varied regular service, a school transport or an excursion driver, it's the same picture everywhere.

There are surveys that say a person speaks about 17,000 words a day (men supposedly 15,000, women on average 19,000); 'hmm' and 'grrr' are not supposed to count.

Of the approximately 540,000 professional drivers (m/f/d/*) in Germany, 78% are bus drivers (in S-Bahn and proper trains, it tends to be train drivers who have no passenger contact, rail transport is not defined as motor transport), because truck drivers, who do not speak to anyone anyway except when picking up a load, unless they are permanently talking to themselves or accompanied by a camera crew, disappear in terms of verbal exchanges.

So the remaining workers in other sectors make up for the underrepresented communication demands, as the average bus driver hardly speaks more than 20 different words, and normally repeats them once every 20 minutes at most. Hardly any of the oldest readers remember the days of buying tickets from the driver.

If the volume of cyclist traffic continues to increase, the curses from the side window about the need to ban and criminalise cycle lanes and all non-motorised locomotion on principle because they only lead to unnecessary braking and impossible adherence to the timetable will of course increase significantly.

The vocabulary noted is least limited to jargon of the transport business per se, but reaches far into the flowery expressions of quite different disciplines such as bestiality, incest, faecal analogies and blasphemy, that one wonders whether, when recruited as a road transport specialist, as bus drivers are called in German-speaking Switzerland, this is one of the prerequisites for consideration or whether it is to be attributed to the extraordinary skills learned in special seminars in addition to instruction in ignoring light signals.

If readers wonder how their children or grandchildren come to use expressions that, despite all efforts to refrain from the above-mentioned metaphors at home, possibly anticipate appropriate adolescent development, it may be assumed that this does not happen at all when playing with peers, but rather on the bus ride to and from school.