I started working as a school bus driver a couple of years ago, and my first run was picking up a wheelchair-bound teenage girl with cerebral palsy and driving her to school. After a couple of weeks my boss called me into the office and told me that the girl’s father had called her about me. I thought I was in trouble for some reason, but my boss told me that the father had wanted to commend me just because I talked to the girl every morning like a normal person. This actually depressed me because it meant that none of the other drivers had ever talked to her for the years she’d been going to this school. It’s like the bare fucking minimum decent thing you can do for someone in a tough situation, and they couldn’t be bothered.

Unfortunately, the run was in demand because it took so long to get to her school (I’d only been given it briefly because we had so many drivers out with COVID-19) and I was soon replaced by a more senior driver - who never acknowledged the girl’s existence, as her father related to me when I ran into him at the local farmers market.