Profile: Oliver Hook, MARTA Bus Operator
April 8, 2009 at 5:24 pm by Andy Nelson in Profile
If you’ve ever ridden MARTA Route 115, chances are Oliver Hook has been your driver. For more than two decades, he’s shuttled riders to and fro, helping them deal with such issues as divorce, depression and — no joke — childbirth.
What is a typical day like for you?
A typical day for me is to be prepared for whatever you may meet. Being a bus operator, you have to be a doctor, a psychiatrist and a counselor. You have to be everything being a bus operator. You have to be prepared for everything physically and mentally.
There have been a lot of times where people will get on with different things. You may have a male or female talking about their divorce. Sometimes, they may be talking about killing themselves. As bus operators, we’re all trained to be able to talk to them and they get off the bus feeling much better.
We like to be called bus operators. Anybody can drive, but it takes a special type of person to operate the vehicle that we operate and keep up with the constant demand.
Have there ever been moments when you’ve had to ask someone to leave, or where you’ve refused to give a ride to someone?
Well, MARTA policy is that you ask someone to pay. However, it’s at the driver’s discretion. Most drivers know everybody, so they’ll say “come on, you’re going to your job,” and we let them go ahead and ride.
I have a very close relationship with my regular riders. I know what time they get off work, I know what time they’re going to catch me, sometimes the train may run different from the schedules and I’ll hold back for a little while and wait on them because these are my regular people, especially late night on my last trip. I may sit back five to fifteen minutes waiting on the train because these are my regular people and I’m the last one to leave the station.
Can you describe any interesting experiences you may have had?
When I first came to the system, I was on a route where this lady kept saying she was going to have a baby, and I didn’t know what to do! What I did was I pulled the bus to the side and asked all the gentlemen to get out. There was a lady on the bus who helped me with it, and after that we took her to Grady Hospital. She later came back to say “thank you.”
I recall one time where I called the police when I drove the bus to a DeKalb County jail because I had some young people acting the fool on there. They were just acting up and clowning around, so I’d had it. I got to the jail and found out that out of all 18 young men, 17 of them were wanted for something.
Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share?
I would recommend that anyone come here and get a job. Most people that come here aren’t in a hurry to leave here. It’s a good job with good benefits. You work in an environment with good people. We’re like family up here. We actually look out and care for each other. When someone is down, we’ll reach down and try to pick them up.
(Photo by Joeff Davis)
Leave a Reply