Raylene Collins says telling her how to drive her bus might be one of them.
The 71-year-old has clocked up millions of kilometres and nearly 50 years as a bus driver in what is a typically male-dominated profession, so you would have to be a brave bloke to take her on.
She is believed to be the first female in the South Island to achieve the 50-year milestone.
Mrs Collins started her driving career as a truck driver in the 1970s, delivering milk from Oamaru to Omarama.
"I drove my first truck when I was 17 — before I had my traffic licence.
"It was my brother-in-law’s job. He was paid to do it, but he used to get drunk a lot, so I did it for him."
Her introduction to bus driving came a few years later, when her first child started attending Milburn School, near Milton.
"I was picking up my child from school one day and I had a babe in arms, and a teacher said to me that they needed a school bus driver.
"So that’s where it started."
This time, she did it legally and got the appropriate licences first.
She drove small buses at the start and worked her way up to doing charters on 40- to 50-seat buses for about nine years.
Then, in the early 1980s, she moved to Dunedin, where she tried to continue her work as a bus driver — but the male-dominated profession threw up many obstacles.
"I went into one bus company and I’ll never forget what the owner said.
"He said, ‘I’ll never let a woman drive my buses’, and then he slammed the door in my face."
She got a similar response from two other Dunedin bus companies.
"I had a really hard time finding a driving job."
She persevered and eventually managed to find a job at Newton’s Coaches, in South Dunedin.
Since then, she has clocked up millions of kilometres with multiple bus companies, doing a mixture of city circuits, school bus runs and long-distance runs across the South Island.
Unfortunately, the discrimination continued throughout much of her career.
"There’s still a lot of discrimination against female drivers out there.
"You’ve just got to be smarter."
She once drove in a convoy of buses from Dunedin to Christchurch, taking people to an Otago v Canterbury rugby game, and on the way home, her bus got a flat tyre.
"In those days, you had to change it yourself.
"I had the spare wheel, but I didn’t have anything to change it with.
"I tried to flag down some of the other buses to help, but they just carried on past.
"So I ended up taking my work shirt off and giving it to one of my male passengers, and he went out to flag a bus down and two stopped immediately.
"They changed the wheel and we carried on. You have to think of other ways to solve problems."
Mrs Collins continues to do charter work and bus runs up to the Macraes mine, and she is not showing any signs of slowing down yet.
"My licence runs out in three years, so I’ll decide then if I’m ready to retire.
"I’m not ready to see what life is like without a steering wheel in my hand yet."
