I’m so angry and …. well, I don’t know the word! Adelina - who is still 6 for a few more days - is not yet home from school. It’s a Friday night and my computer time is 6:43 pm! Her school dismisses at 3 pm and she is typically home by 4. When it hit 4:20 and she still wasn’t home (I hadn’t panicked yet b/c it is a rainy Friday and she is coming from Phoenix) I called to find out an ETA. I was told she had a substitute driver and they also had a couple of extra kids routed with her today. I was informed that they were still a ways out, but at least I knew she was safe, picked up, and on her way home.
Then, it hit 5:25 and I was starting to get rather perturbed. That is way too much time for a kid to be in traffic. Kids are supposed to be playing and having fun. I called the van company again, but this time it went to voice mail. No doubt because the dispatchers and coordinators were done with their workday and had gone home! I left a message with my usual contact explaining that this was NOT acceptable and that she was still not home. I wasn’t super mad yet, though, because I still naively thought she might arrive home at any moment. After all, it only takes so long to get from point A to point B even in bad traffic. Boy, how wrong I was. Evidently, when CrazyDriver is driving, you can drive around in circles for almost 3 hours and still not find your way.
So, here is how it played out. It hits 5:50 and I’m starting to get panicky. Someone has my child in a van and I don’t know where they are and all I know is they aren’t here, so where are they!? I call again and this time push a different extension and get a general dispatcher. This time I get abundant apologies and am told that the driver got lost. Okay, so where is she now? I’m told she is at an intersection about 8 miles from our house, but in the neighboring town and nowhere along the route from school to home. At this point, I tell them to please have her stop driving. We will come pick up our daughter. I’m so ready for these people to not have her any more in their care. They are so incompetent!! In order to get that to happen, I had to insist that they find me a supervisor. I was told the supervisors were in an important meeting. Who has important meetings at 6 pm on Friday evening!? In any case, I wait a good while, but somebody does eventually come to the phone, and once he understands the situation, he is appalled at what has happened and determined to rectify it. He instructed the driver to STOP (which I had been trying to have them do for quite some time). She had now driven an additional 6 miles the opposite direction from our house and into the next town and even crossed a major highway in the process - (how on earth do people with such poor directional skills become a driver for a transportation company!?). Steve, thankfully, was en route and in another 15 minutes arrived at her location to claim Adelina. She was hungry and a bit shaken, but otherwise okay. I spent some more time on the phone with the van company, but they are not through dealing with us regarding this nightmare.
It is just around 7:00 pm and I expect them to arrive home in the next 5-10 minutes. So let’s see, that’s 4 hours from door to door. Can you imagine!? I think there might be steam coming out of my ears.
Ok, thanks for listening to my rant. I had to get that out. You may return to the more pleasant things in life now.
