After the crash

Well as you can imagine after a crash like that I got a lot of stick for it. In some places it would be called 'taking the mickey' but we call it 'taking the piss'. Well I have done my fair share of it in the past and am still doing it today. So you have to take it on the chin.

That is not to say that the staff were not sympathetic because they were. I was not the only person to take a bus under a bridge. Several had been done over the years and ALL by very experienced drivers. But after the initial shock and getting my job back, OH! did it start!

The usual ones like 'a bridge to far' and others came my way and followed me for years after that. Pictures of the bus that I crashed were shown to new entrants as a warning about bridges and the dangers of going of route. I even got my name in 'The Sun', the national newspaper. Just a small piece but it was there.

But when you do something like that there is only two ways to go. You can get nasty and punch the lights out of the first person to say anything or you can take it on the chin and wait for it to die down. And it always will because sooner or later there will be someone that does something else. As I was built for comfort and not fighting of course I just took it.

The boss who had the job to sack me and then give me my job back was behind the scenes very sympathetic. One day not long after the event when I was in work on my own he came in and just said, 'Steve, how the f*^k did you manage that'. We had a long talk over it and he was a good guy. He came across as a hard man but never sacked a man without massive cause.

So that was that and in the next blog I will put in a bit about how my job changed for the next 20 odd years.