A school minibus is signed out and signed in with the odometer written in a book in the driver's hand, every trip, because the insurance requires it. Over a half term the book and the dashboard disagree by fourteen miles, and the fuel agrees with the dashboard.
I am the transport coordinator at a school with two seventeen seat minibuses, and I have signed for them since 2011.
The book, because the book is the evidence.
Before a trip the driver signs out the keys and writes the mileage off the dash. After it they write the mileage again, and the difference is the trip, and they sign. There is a walkaround check with tick boxes, fuel added goes in with a receipt number, and defects go in red.
I reconcile it monthly. Start of month reading, plus every trip, equals end of month reading. It has to, because the odometer only counts forwards.
That reconciliation is not bureaucracy for its own sake. If a minibus is in an incident, the first thing anybody asks is who was driving and what the vehicle had done, and a book that does not add up is a school in front of a coroner with no answer.
Minibus two gains fourteen miles a half term.
Fourteen, thirteen, fifteen, fourteen, fourteen. Fourteen terms of records in front of me as I write this and the mean is fourteen point one.
It is always the dash that is higher than the book.
The obvious answer is a driver who did not write it down.
That was my answer for two years and I went at it properly, because it is a disciplinary matter and it is also a safeguarding one if somebody is taking a school minibus out unlogged.
The keys are in a cabinet in the school office, which is alarmed out of hours and which has a key log of its own. The minibus is parked inside a gated compound with a camera on the gate.
Nobody has taken it out. There is no footage, no key log entry, no fuel card transaction, and we are a small enough school that there is no version of this in which twenty seven separate unlogged journeys over fourteen terms happened without a single person noticing.
What the fuel says, which is what moved this from annoying to something else.
Minibus two does about twenty four miles to the gallon and I have six years of fuel card data against six years of logged mileage, and that figure is steady to within a mile per gallon.
If fourteen miles a half term were a faulty odometer counting miles the bus never did, the calculated consumption would drift, because the fuel would not be there to match the miles.
It does not drift. The extra miles are fuelled. Over six years that is about three hundred and forty miles and fourteen gallons, and fourteen gallons has gone through the tank and been paid for on our card.
What has been checked mechanically.
The odometer and the speedometer were checked in 2018 against a rolling road at an MOT station as a favour, and are within one percent.
The tyres are the specified size, which matters because an undersized tyre makes an odometer over-read, and an over-read of that scale would be a couple of percent, which on our annual mileage would be two hundred miles, not fourteen.
The MOT certificate mileage matches the dash every year, which it would, because the tester reads the dash.
And the thing I tried in 2019: I read the dash myself, with a photograph, on the last afternoon of a half term and the first morning of the next one.
Fourteen days, gates locked, nobody in the building for eleven of them.
The reading on the first morning was nine miles higher than the photograph.
The tank.
In 2021 I filled it to the brim myself on the last day of the summer term, wrote the reading, photographed the dash and the pump receipt, and locked the compound.
On the first day of September I filled it to the brim again before it moved.
It took one point one gallons.
What I do about it.
I reconcile the book to the dash and I write the difference in as an adjustment, with the word UNEXPLAINED and my initials, which is what you do with any discrepancy you cannot account for, and my auditors have seen it three times and accepted it.
The servicing is done on mileage and the mileage is the dash, so the bus is serviced slightly early, which nobody minds.
The one change I made is that minibus two is the one I drive.
We have two, and staff take whichever is free, and I have quietly made two the one I book for myself by keeping it on the board as allocated. It does the short runs now. Swimming on a Tuesday, the sports fixtures on a Thursday, and it is back before dark in winter.
I want to be clear that I have never found anything wrong with that vehicle. It drives straight, the brakes are good, it has never failed an MOT on anything but a bulb.
The reason I drive it is a note in the back of my book from October 2022, which says that on the first morning back from that half term the driver's seat was three notches further forward than I leave it, and I am the only person who had the keys, and I am five foot four.