(Bus driver for a local transit agency) Right now I am half way through my probation at work. During this time, management can fire me for just about anything.
No surprising, myself and other probationers really follow the rules to the letter, because none of us want to take any risks. One of the things we’re required to do is to report any accident involving a transit vehicle, be it ours or another one out on the road, even if its something slight (such as a dinged side mirror that caused no actual damage).
The other day, I go into the driver’s room to overhear another veteran driver who is very irate. It seems one of the new people saw him clip the side mirror of his bus against a pole. The mirror wasnt damaged, but it definitely made contact. Technically, the veteran driver is supposed to report this, but often if there’s no visible damage they don’t. The novice driver, trying to follow the rules to the letter, DID report it however, and by using the Bus number and other information they were able to track down the veteran driver in question. The veteran driver, busted by another driver, is treating this as some act of betrayal.
It was a little jarring for me because it occurred to me that I would’ve done the exact same thing the other new guy did (report the other driver). The supervisors can be really petty about some things, and as selfish as it sounds I wouldn’t want to risk getting in trouble for NOT reporting it (if they knew I witnessed it). This type of thing, of course alienates me from fellow drivers, so its sort of a dilemma for me. But the buses have cameras all over the place, and it just seems really foolish to play dumb about hitting something with the bus, even if no damage was caused. They can review the camera footage and bust you in a lie. Supervisors will also go as far as they can to try to bait drivers into lying/incriminating themselves if they suspect wrongdoing.
Since I’m new, I have some rather idealistic views on work ethics. I really believe that all drivers should be held accountable for what they do on the road. I also feel like the better our drivers are, both in driving skill and customer service, the greater of a value we provide to the county, which gives our Union a stronger bargaining angle.
I do think that the new driver would be wise to be a little politically savvy about it. The new employee is in the right to make sure the incident gets reported, but should avoid a situation where he reports it but makes it obvious that the veteran driver wasn’t going to report it. This could be by going to the veteran driver and saying something. Possibly it could be by reporting it and saying “I’m not 100% sure this happened, and I’m sure the driver couldn’t possibly have noticed it.” The new driver should be careful not to come across as trying to score points at the expense of the other driver.
We do need people with integrity. We need people who can honestly say that if they see an incident involving a bus, they will report it. We need people who can be trusted to own up to their mistakes.
I think things like this need to be treated in a practical way. If YOU had clipped the mirror, then sure, report it. However seeing someone else have a very minor incident that caused no visible damage and that you can quite easily claim to not have seen, I’d just forget about it. It’d be different if you believed that some good could come out of the report, say the mirror contact was the result of a series of errors and you think it’s important to highlight how those errors can lead to an incident, I’d report that.
A good reporting system should have some mechanism for protecting both the reporter and the reportee. It seems as though you don’t have that, or if you do, it’s not robust enough.
This is not at all “weird” in safety or financially sensitive jobs. But 1920s has a good point, such systems should and generally do have protections in place for the reporter. The new employee should inform himself about such protections and whether his name was revealed to the other driver inappropriately.
I can - a friend on the East Coast lost his 20+ year job as a garage truck operator for violating a zero-tolerance policy against backing up. He somehow got into a place where his options were
a: Go forward and scrape a parked car.
b: Wait an indeterminate time for the car to move.
c: Back up a foot to get clearance and then pull out.
d: Levitate
The *truck * tattled on him and he was summarily canned by the end of the day. He would still be employed if he’d driven forward and damaged the car.
Yeah, it seems pretty Russian. You guys aren’t in Russia, are you?
I would probably NOT report something that minor if I were new somewhere and it was a veteran who did it, if only b/c of politics. If it were something more serious, I probably would. Reporting someone clipping a mirror is not worth the ire of your colleagues, IMHO!
Well yeah, but if you had been passing by in another garbage truck, would you have reported your friend for backing up?
Your story basically says the older bus driver should have reported himself, instead of being busted by the newbie. Which is a different discussion altogether.
A workplace can have all the rules it wants about things employees should report their fellow employees for. But if those rules do not strike me as “reasonable” - and especially if the guy I rat on is gonna be able to learn who turned him in, I’m gonna at least consider the possibility of saying, “Hmm? I must not have been paying attention. Didn’t happen to see that.”
I was a trucker for years, and I gotta say I’d be pretty pissed if someone did that to me. No harm, no foul I say. Right or wrong, word gets out when people do that, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that guy (the rat) in the OP became a pariah. I definitely wouldn’t trust him and would steer clear of him, and I wouldn’t be shy about letting him know why.
When I was on my probationary period, I turned around on a dirt turnabout I’d been using for a weeks while covering a vacationing driver’s route. It was raining heavily, and we (I was accompanied by a manager/supervisor) failed to notice that the dirt turnaround had been rototilled, rolled and seeded since we’d last driven across it two days earlier. It was loose soil and really muddy, and I just powered through it and we left.
When we got back to the terminal a few hours later I got called into the terminal manager’s office. The property owner called and reported we’d driven over his newly-seeded lawn. So I was presented with two options.
Option 1: They could write it up as an “accident”, and the company would pay for it, but I’d lose my job.
Option 2: I could make arrangements to repair it myself, and pay for it out of my own pocket, and they’d bury it and I’d keep my job.
I took option 2. I called a buddy of mine and offered him a 12-pack and a few bucks to go fix it. I bought some grass seed and gave him directions to get there and a rake and he took care of it for me. Everyone was happy.
That was the second probationary accident 'd gotten in. I actually did some pretty serious damage to a guy’s front bumper the previous summer - I was pulling away from double-parking near the car and the rear-end of my truck swung out and my bumper caught his. I don’t remember how that played out, it was so long ago, but I know I had to go through an interview process when I was granted my franchise and local management told me to say I’d never been in an accident during my probationary period.
I had a number of minor to serious accidents during my driving years, but none of them ever cost me my job.
gotpasswords, I do feel sorry for your friend at the loss of his job. But he did have a few other options.
He could have called for assistance. If the car was parked illegally maybe it could have been towed. Maybe managmeent would actually prefer he wait than violate what is probably some clause in their insurance policy. In any case, once he reports his situation, it becomes management’s problem, too.
Also, once he did back up, things might have gone better for him if he came clean and reported the situation, rather than getting caught by the truck’s reporting system. When I have screwed up in the workplace, things have always gone much better when management heard it from me first rather than from some other source.
I say this not to rip on your friend, but to help someone else from meeting the same fate unnecessarily.
Loyalty to your fellow employees as loyalty is defined by your fellow employees, will most likely be the best course to take. That is if you can EVER think of a time in the future when you might need someone to “have your six”.
If there was a chance that my boss knew I had witnessed the accident, then maybe I would rat the guy out. Otherwise, no. It wouldn’t be worth the headache and stress of dealing with an irate coworker and his allies.
Now if he had done a real hit-and-run number and had caused property damage, that’s another matter.
Whatever you do to keep your job is the right thing to do. Every one of those people would ‘betray’ you, if it meant *their * job. And, if you don’t report it, you are betraying your company, the very ones that trusted you enough to give you their property to use to make a living, and to give you money in return for those services. BTW, you can always play dumb: “I wasn’t paying attention. I was too busy doing MY OWN job.”
It kind of depends on what happens following the report, I guess. If it’s so they can have maintenance double check to make sure it’s not damaged or something, sure I would, albeit hopefully anonymously. If it means veteran driver gets his Christmas bonus halved, I wouldn’t. If it goes on his “permanent record,” I probably wouldn’t, people have bad luck sometimes.
However, I’m really not down with the “snitchers are worse than perpetrators” rule, and don’t think new guy deserves to be hated by all the other guys for not knowing the unspoken pacts. That could potentially affect him seriously later, over something tiny.
So…CA isn’t an at-will employment state? I thought most states were now, so probationary periods don’t really matter. They can always fire you without cause. (and you can quit easily. so they say.) Ah, wiki says it’s one of 11 states that seems to actually need a reason to fire you.
I don’t think the rule your company has is fair. You’re threatened with termination for not reporting, and if you do report it you’re likely to face the wrath of not only the person you reported on, but people who like them too. Way to foster team morale. :dubious:
I see two problems with this scenario - the veteran driver didn’t report what he knew he was supposed to report, and the system allowed him to find out who did report him. The processes are put in place for a reason, and a workplace is not a high school full of cliques. Actually, make that three problems - the workplace environment that encourages the veteran driver to not report as he is supposed to and supports him getting angry at a subordinate who did his job properly.
Report away, Incubus. If your incompetent co-workers can’t handle it, maybe they should quit clipping mirrors.
Minor mirror incidents were fairly common when I drove a truck and none of them were ever reported if there was no damage. Heck, I think our bosses as well as the other drivers would consider you a moron if you did, because it basically fell under the “No harm, No foul” rule.
The most common point of contact was the wide angle mirrors out front, which make the vehicle a lot wider. When you already have turning radius issues, you get used to the idea that if you ‘tip’ those mirrors, it’s no big deal.
I only reported one guy for a mirror smash, because he nearly took the guy’s arm off in the process and he’d already spent two days scaring the shit out of me and nearly killing bystanders with his inattentive driving. He was very deservedly fired for it, but only because he failed to report it when I already had.
