Gus the Bus R Us

Note: the following story is rather silly. I should also note that this story, in all its ridiculous glory, is entirely true. Enjoy.

Earlier this week, Holli (the Special Projects Manager at Shared Harvest) approached me about a country club in Warren County who is holding a food drive and in need of a barrel pick-up. Their food drive ends on Monday, September 7th, but they had already filled one barrel and wanted it collected a little early. I nervously orchestrated the pick-up with Holli and marked my calendar for Thursday, Sept. 3rd at 10:00 a.m.

On Tuesday afternoon, Meredith confirmed that Alex would also be working on the Holiday Food Drive this year. We will be working together to recruit more organizations to hold food drives AND to pick up and drop off barrels for food collection. Whew! What a relief to know that I would always have a partner and friend along with me on these excursions.

Later in the day, Holli taught me the basics of using the Shared Harvest "van" for food drive deliveries. For some reason, everyone around here calls this vehicle a van. Does this look like a van to you?

I've driven a few vans in my time, and this is no van. This is a truck. It doesn't require a CDL to drive, but that small detail didn't comfort Alex or me much. We envisioned ourselves causing mile-long back-ups as we steered the big box down the highway. We envisioned Tina saying, "We're not mad, we just want to know why the van is in pieces." When Meredith told us stories from her days driving the van as a VISTA, our nervousness increased further. Suddenly the thought of completing simple tasks like "backing up" and "parking" made my stomach rumble, no matter how much anyone reassured us that we would be "fine." Ha.

On Thursday morning, I brought Alex up to speed on the details of the spreadsheets, databases, and policies with the food drive. As hard as we tried to focus on other work, we spent our first hour and a half biting our nails and watching the clock. Finally, at 9:00 a.m. we couldn't avoid it any longer--it was time to hit the road. By this point, the entire office knew about our upcoming adventure and wished us luck as we marched into the warehouse, van keys in hand. Darrell helped us load a two-wheel dolly, 7 empty banana boxes, and a forklift palette into the back of the "van." Take a look at the picture of our loading process.

You'll notice the cart, the stack of banana boxes which we were to load the food into, and the shiny thing in Alex's hand. What is it? The handle for the van's back door. I know what you're thinking, and no, we didn't break it! It was already broken. Seriously. So to open the door we have to jimmy the handle into a hole where the handle used to be, twist, and lift the door. When we're finished, we close the door, pull out the handle, and store it up front with us in the cabin. Hey, it works for us! Besides, no one ever said working for a non-profit was glamorous.

We agreed that I would drive there and Alex would drive home, just so we could both get familiar with the "van." I carefully backed up inch by inch, but I quickly realized that I could not rely so heavily on the rear view mirror for these trips. First of all, there was no rear view mirror, and even if there was one, it would do no good to reflect the big box behind us. This was going to be interesting.

Next we had to make it down the driveway. This seems simple enough, oh, except for the gigantic potholes and crumbling asphalt on the path standing between us and the street. The following is a sampling of the sounds you would have heard, had you been anywhere near the van as we descended the driveway:

"Ooo, ooo, whoa, AH!, okay okay, eeee....oof! *bang*pow* Uh-oh. Hahaha it's fine, it's fine, we're alright *pop*crack* ahh!!"

The rest of the drive sounded a lot like that as we hit bumps in the road and merged in and out of traffic. This is the visual version of that:

(I'm sure my father, who works as a real truck driver, is very proud.)

We pulled into the country club about half an hour later. I didn't even attempt to maneuver into a parking space--but 3 spaces seemed to suffice. We walked into the reception area and brightly greeted the woman sitting behind the desk. She pointed us toward a barrel near the entrance, which we expected to contain dozens of tasty treasures brimming near the top. However, we found quite the opposite: one lonely jar of peanut butter and a bag of cookie mix sitting all the way at the bottom of the barrel. We looked at the receptionist quizzically, then at the food, then at each other, then back to the receptionist and asked: "Is this it?"

She smiled and said, "Yep!" I considered asking her why in the world we had just taken the joy ride of our lives to pick up these two measly food items. Instead we smiled, stifled our incredulous giggles, and patiently asked one more time if she was sure there were no other barrels marked for pick-up. "Nope, that's it!" Alex and I exchanged one more glance, then leaned into the barrel and carried our goods out to the "van." We opened the back door, placed the two items in one of our seven boxes, and prepared for the trip home.

Before we could make it to the interstate, though, we agreed that we should probably double check with our contact person at the golf course to make sure we weren't missing anything. We'd hate to return back to Shared Harvest with only two items--how would you explain that? Sure enough, there was an entire other barrel stashed in a nearby closet, so we turned around and went back to pick it up. We shared a laugh with the receptionist, who was clearly as clueless as we were, and started loading the food into our boxes.

After a few minutes we were back on the road and it was Alex's turn to drive. It seemed like we had to merge about a thousand times, but we made it back safe and sound. Once back at Shared Harvest, we weighed the load and discovered that the country club had collected 130 lbs of food. Not bad! We could handle this!

Oh and one more thing. In case you're wondering about the title, Alex and I named the "van." Yeah--his name is now Gus the Bus. We figure that if everyone else misnames the truck as "van," we should get to call it whatever we want too, hence: Gus the Bus.