What was driving like back when...

clarnzz

Well-Known Member
Fairly new compared to a lot of these (10 years driving), 120 stops on my route was back at 4:30 and an hourish of bonus, now it's 160 and back at 5:30 and scratch or slightly under or over or 140 stops and back at 4:30 and barely over 8 hour planned day.
 

rod

Retired 23 years
We were allowed to make decisions how to run our routes. Driver Sups were allowed to actually dispatch. And Center Managers were rarely seen.


Management was gone for the day after the troops had left the building Friday morning. You were on your own if you had a breakdown or any other problem on a Friday.
 

The Milkman

Well-Known Member
It was a different world, give me back my clipboard and toss away my smartphone and diad. No air commits, 815 start time and nothing over 50 lbs.

Yes so true, you could actually sort your load and think for yourself as how to best run your route on any given day. Make service a priority as always. Going out of your way to meet customer demands without having to ask some knucklehead for permission. No complaints, no driver follow ups.The green sheets looked great..Now start to add a 3 pm commit times in the early 80's for NDA, then noon, then down to 10:30, add more weight to packages, increase volume overseas, go public. Service then became a daily juggling act. The tentacles were creeping around the world and slowly but surely the braintrusts in Greenwich, then the "What can Brown Do for You?" crowd in Atlanta decided that answering to the shareholders was more important than to the customers that made UPS the global behemoth it became.. With the Fat Cats on the board, Less and less chance for advancement for center manager's, on cars etc as centers got larger with more workload dumped on them. Districts and Regions consoliadate, and the Fat Cats keep squeezing every drop of blood out of those under them, laughing all the way to the Bank
 

The Milkman

Well-Known Member
Fairly new compared to a lot of these (10 years driving), 120 stops on my route was back at 4:30 and an hourish of bonus, now it's 160 and back at 5:30 and scratch or slightly under or over or 140 stops and back at 4:30 and barely over 8 hour planned day.

Keep it up and you will surely be rewarded with more stops. In a few more years you will wishing for the good old days of 120 stops as your Knees, back and other joints will be feeling your efforts
 

mpeedy

Well-Known Member
Some LP were retired cops and carried pistols. C.O.D.'s meant cash or check. It was not unusual for a driver to come in with a couple of grand.Their were drivers who would float C.O.D. money in thier pockets till pay day. Some would get caught and fired. Package cars would have cash drop box safes welded to the floor in the back. DIADS would crash often so spare ones were left in drop boxes just incase. No DR,had to get sigs or SDNotices. Drivers would have packs of sighned SDNotices of reg customers in cab. Had a retired driver from the 50's and 60's tell me that pkg. cars didn't have shelves in the back. No one wore a seat belt or closed the bulkhead door. When comming up to a stop you would throw the handbrake on at 5 MPH, get out of the seat, grab your next package in the back , and hopfully be down the steps before the car stoped. It was a race to finish your route, race to the hub and grab more pkgs to back out to deliver.
 

burrheadd

KING Of GIFS
ImageUploadedByBrownCafe1431091501.111728.jpg
 

clarnzz

Well-Known Member
Keep it up and you will surely be rewarded with more stops. In a few more years you will wishing for the good old days of 120 stops as your Knees, back and other joints will be feeling your efforts

It's a good route, I don't run.. Deliver less than 250 pieces a day and pickup 20-30. Very laid back run, I work smart not especially hard. I look at these bricked out 1000's and 1200's in the morning and cringe.
 

clarnzz

Well-Known Member
Keep it up and you will surely be rewarded with more stops. In a few more years you will wishing for the good old days of 120 stops as your Knees, back and other joints will be feeling your efforts

The added stops came from taking 4 pickups off me I had to 10 mile round trip to and taking air away from me I used to have to 10 mile round trip to once Orion went in as well as some rural stuff. Went from 120-130 miles a day to 85-95.
 
O

OLDMAN3

Guest
-Pens were black ink only, because carbon copy is blue.
-Bulkhead and rear doors were secured with a padlock that was ice cold in winter.
-6 cubes had wood shelves for slivers under your fingernails.
-Beepers were not invented yet.
-0 missed stops for the first 5 years I drove...really.
-Chain to measure packages too large for UPS+50 lb limit
-Call tags only for packages originally sent UPS
-"ready customers", Call tags, Metro pickups the only ways to ship
-manually total stops, pkgs etc at end of day
-Perfect sheeting or void the whole line
-Fur tag pickups for stinky old ladies
-Your route/streets were well defined, anything else had to be cut to you.
-Paper delivery records sucked in the rain
-Manual transmission with a choke, manual steering, hard clutch.
-Bankers clip secured records to clipboard, cut COD tags and had a hundred "MacGyver" uses
8:15 start, 5:30 punch out most days unless you ran and got it in at 4:00
 
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