18 Secrets of UPS Drivers

[OxQQme]

1. They’re always being watched.
“one minute per driver per day over the course of a year adds up to $14.5 million,” and “one minute of idle per driver per day is worth $500,000 of fuel at the end of the year.” The hand-held computer drivers carry around, called a DIAD (short for Delivery Information Acquisition Device), tracks their every move. Ever wondered why your UPS man can’t stick around to hear your life story? He probably has between 150 and 200 stops to make before the end of the day, and he’s being timed.

9. Dog bites are part of the job.
“Most UPS drivers are attacked by dogs,” says one former New Orleans-based UPS driver. “What you do is jump on the hood of the nearest vehicle and don’t move. There were some drivers that sat on the hood of a car for an hour or more.” Of course, UPS doesn’t train its drivers to jump on top of cars to avoid dogs, but it does tell them to shout “UPS!” before entering the property so dogs won’t be caught off guard. Their handheld devices can also keep track of houses that might have dangerous dogs on the property and warn drivers ahead of time. “We wanna protect our drivers,” Cardillo says.


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[empedocles]

1. Mailpersons are under a similiar gun. My mailman said the asshole managers

readadjusted his route to make it 12 minutes longer. Lasted a month, but all the up and downstream adjustments to the other routes fouled up. mail persons have to pump. When the subs do the same route on the 6th day they routinely run an hour or two later - and thats with dumping some of the ads and putting some of the mail off to the regular people. Easy to see all of them rush when they do the grouped mailboxes of a dozen or so homes. They look like assembly line people paid by the item, working fast for getting paid by the piece.

[Midnight Writer]

7. I used to keep the carrier stats at the USPS. They were allowed 32 seconds per delivery point.

They also had checkpoints along the route they had to scan to prove they were there on time.

[Mike 03]

2. This one is shocking:

6. The trucks are “big brown microwaves.”
They don’t have air conditioning, so drivers run their routes with the doors open to stay cool. “It is cold in winter and hot in the summer,” Widmann says. “It was wonderful to have 50 and 60 degree days.”

What about a city like Phoenix or Las Vegas, where it's not rare to have temperatures around 110, even higher? It seems cruel that the UPS trucks don't have AC. Man, that's brutal.

But very interesting article!

[Ferrets are Cool]

5. Yeah, down in south Alabama, they undergo excruciating heat daily

I honestly don't know how they don't have more heat related deaths.

[Mike 03]

3. I guess this means, don't order cheese from iGourmet during a heatwave. nt

[Ferrets are Cool]

4. Are UPS drivers still a part of the Teamsters Union?

If so, this is a union problem.

[MuseRider]

6. One of them saved my life!

I got a whopping case of pneumonia. I knew what it was but my Doctor husband said I was just being a baby. My UPS guy came up to the front door, it was wide open in February and found me on the floor in my undies and a tee shirt picking butterflies out of the sky. I was totally out of my mind. He knew that another person on his route was a friend of mine so he closed the door and drove to her house. That must have cost him. She came over and took me to the ER where they almost had to do a cut down to put in the IV. 7 liters of fluid later I got a room, 10 days later I was out of the hospital.

He was a great guy that ended up with MS so bad he had to quit. I kept up with him for a while but we were never friends. At least he knew how much he was appreciated by me.

[SeattleVet]

8. They track everyone and everything.

When I was working in IT in a huge NYC bank a friend left the company and went to work for UPS in their IT department. She lasted a couple of weeks (with every trip to the bathroom, or a stop to ask someone in another cubicle about something, or even a wrong turn down an unfamiliar hallway being logged, and quit. She said it was unnerving knowing that everything you did (down to keystroke logging) was under tight surveillance. She left and got a job with another bank.

I doubt that I would be able to have been working under those conditions, either.