This is why your UPS driver is in such great shape

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m in the middle of my 30-day trial period as a package car driver for UPS.

Here’s how it all went down.

Because UPS is a ‘union shop,’ everything is governed by the current collective bargaining agreement between the company and the Teamsters. The contract states that you attain your official ‘seniority’ in the union after 70 working days, which is about three months of five-day work weeks. Until then you’re pretty much stuck at the entry level.

I knew that I didn’t want to do part-time, entry-level work forever, so I signed up on every ‘bid sheet’ that appeared. Bid sheets are the way the company gives formal notice of new opportunities. The system works only if you tell the company what you want – nobody gets anything they don’t ask for. And because it’s a seniority based system, you only get opportunities that haven’t already been bid on by people with more seniority.

Obviously, the most prominent and prevalent opportunity at UPS is full-time package car driver. I started putting my name on bid sheets well before I made my seniority. I figured I had nothing to lose.

As it happened, my name came up on the bid sheet on my 70th day, the first day I became eligible. It was Friday, October 23rd. This coincided with a hiring frenzy ramping up for ‘peak season’ during the holidays. The next day I took my road test, and by Monday the 26th I was enrolled in a three-day online course that now stands in lieu of Integrad, UPS’s week-long intensive driver-training course that has been temporarily suspended for the duration of the pandemic.

Along the way, I also had to get what’s called a DOT physical. That, dear reader, was quite the odyssey, which I’ll have to save for another post.

After my three-day online course, I rode along with drivers doing their usual routes for the rest of that week (the last week of October) and the entire following week (the first week of November). On Monday, November 9th, I’d been placed on my training route, 02E, the route that I’d be assigned for my 30-day trial.

For my first three days on 02E I rode with the route’s usual driver. The following day was my first day behind the wheel. I was so anxious! Up until then I’d never driven a package car, other than to take my road test two and a half weeks earlier.

But I really shouldn’t have been. I’d spent all that intervening time listening, observing, taking notes, and doing everything besides drive the vehicle. This includes selecting packages from the cargo area, delivering them at the stops, and logging all the information on the handheld device known as the ‘DIAD’ – a process commonly referred to as ‘sheeting,’ a nod to when all the paperwork used actual paper.

I understood the fundamentals of driving, so it all came quickly to me.

My first day as a driver was Thursday, November 12th. That first day I rode with a supervisor who tested my knowledge and gave me feedback about my techniques. He told me I was figuring things out quickly and I knew how to hustle.

My second day, Friday, November 13th, I was completely on my own.

Since then, I’ve been driving the 02E route every Tuesday through Friday. (I also work Saturdays, but Saturday routes are different from weekday routes, and so far I’ve been bounced around.) This past Monday, November 30th, marked the official start to peak season, and also the beginning of my six-day work weeks. I drove Monday through Saturday last week, and I expect to do so for the duration of peak.

What’s it like to be a UPS package car driver? Well, in an earlier post I compared it to running a marathon every day. I mean that literally. In fact, I don’t think I could succeed at this if I wasn’t a long-distance runner.

My daily marathon starts about a half-hour before my official start time at 9 am. I come into the warehouse, pick up my DIAD, check in with my loader about the packages on my car, and try to prepare mentally and physically for my day. A computer terminal shows me a map and a manifest of all my stops. All this information gets loaded into my DIAD eventually, but not early enough for me to really study it before departure.

As soon as my package car is completely loaded, I drive to my area, a flat grid about three-quarters of a mile squared in midtown about twenty minutes’ drive time from the warehouse.

I spend the first portion of my route delivering all my ‘airs,’ those packages shipped overnight that are guaranteed to be delivered by 10:30, followed by my ‘bulk stops,’ where I unload anywhere from five to 35 packages at a single stop. My bulk stops include several national retail chains, a medium-sized hospital, and various medical offices.

Then it’s a mad rush to see how many deliveries I can make before the afternoon when I start making the rounds for pickups, in many cases at the same places I’d already delivered to earlier in the day.

My first pickup is scheduled for 2:50 pm, and my last one is scheduled for after 4 pm. Then it’s off to the ‘air meet,’ where I can hand another driver all the packages I’ve picked up that need to get shipped overnight. After that I can resume deliveries until I’ve completed my route. Then I drive the twenty or so minutes back to the warehouse.

When I first began my training route, I was given about 80 stops, deliveries and pickups combined. That number has since grown to about 120-130 stops. I’m not sure if this is the result of higher package volume, a gradual increase of their expectation of me as a driver, both, or neither. As a consequence my shifts have been getting gradually longer, even as the sun sets earlier. This past Saturday I had 150 stops, many in the same area as my training route, and I completed my shift at 8 pm – the last three-plus hours in the dark of night.

This is just a basic overview. I have so much more to share about my experiences on my training route. What are you curious about? Use the comment box below to ask questions and offer feedback.