Longest wait ever for front sections, and how I forgot to stick a few of them in

Yesterday, Sunday 1/25, the front sections didn't arrive at the distribution center until 5:00!

They're supposed to be there by 4ish. It's not uncommon for them to get there later than usual thereby monkeying us up (such as happened on 1/18), but I don't know if I recall them ever being later than 4:30 before, until yesterday. So, the way that they bungled it yesterday has earned itself a blog entry.

"The good news", as the Times' employee said to us as we were waiting, was that we'd therefore have until 8:30 (as opposed to the usual 7:30 deadline) to complete our deliveries. That meant that for the houses that we'd be delivering to between 7:30 and 8:30, we wouldn't have to worry about the $1.50 that, under normal conditions, the Times would clip us for each paper that a customer happens to call and report not having at their doorstep.

Well that's nice, but it's not the only thing.

"It'll still make me look bad", I remarked. Probably only a certain percentage of the customers who haven't gotten their paper by 7:30, call the Times to say so by 8:29. And even if that's a higher percentage than I think it is, all of those $1.50 charges would arguably still only be chump change compared to all of the _tips_ that I've gotten partly for _not_ being late (or at least not being late very often, at least not to any more than the very last street or two). Therefore, what I was mainly thinking about was how all of the customers on the whole last third of the route would simply _see_ me delivering late and perhaps think that I must have drank the night before or something.

Well in _another_ twist, I _had_ drunk the night before!

(It was with certain neighbors who invite me to do so, fortunately not very often. I was a teetaler until I was 28, and even today, when I'm by myself I can make a 30-pack last months. But this was one of the 30-pack-a-_day_ crowds that I had previously _told_ that I can't accept any more of the _Saturday_-night invitations of. They called me up anyhow - with friends like that, who needs enemies? - but, this time it just so happened that I had taken an amply long snooze on Saturday afternoon, plus I was two months behind on the inside dirt from this swamp-boundary faction of the neighbors; so, I accepted. Hmmm, time to see if I can get the caller ID working again.)

The hangover _might_ help explain why I forgot to stick a few of the front sections in.

Another factor (and the one that I prefer to use as my _official_ excuse) was that this was also the first Sunday of the Times' disappointing joining of the currently-popular-in-the-newspaper-industry, candy-bar-inflation trick of making its papers narrower. I think the resulting unfamiliar-to-me shape of the papers played a significant role in throwing me off, because I'm _very_ familiar with my big grey plastic containers when they're stuffed with bagged papers that are in the container vertically _and_ with the tops of them 1 1/2" closer to the top of the container than they were yesterday: It means, "Front sections not stuck in yet."

Plus, it's not very often that I stick the front sections in _during_ the delivery like I did yesterday, so I was out of practice in that connection. It seems that most carriers do it that way, but I largely stopped doing it that way after about the first half of 2007 when it dawned on me that I can save a whole bunch of idling by sticking all 180 of them in at the distribution center before leaving there.

In addition to saving a bunch of idling, I figured out equally early on that there are also several other advantages to having all of the papers assembled before leaving the distribution center. Right off the bat, it minimizes the disturbing of the people sleeping in the houses, because you're usually stopped directly in front of a house during the extra seconds that it takes to stick the front section in.

In early 2007 when I was still sticking them in while underway, I ameliorated that factor a little bit by sticking as many of them in as possible in the rare places along the route where I could stop without being directly in front of any house. The best such place - and I became a fixture there for several months - is just across the Morgan Highway from the route, near the library.

Speaking of that early-2007 period when I was a fixture at that spot, that was also the setting of one of the stories that, in "Hey snowplow drivers - _I_ rule this hour", I promised to unleash about how "other elements of the ruling-of-the-streets-at-this-hour subculture were much quicker [than a certain snowplow driver] to get used to my presence therein". Here's that story:

Clarks Summit is thick with cops, and sure enough, it didn't take long for one of them to pull up to me to check me out as I was sitting there (near the library) sticking the front sections in. Both then, and a month or so earlier on Sunset when a cop did the same thing but even more briefly, the cops were satisfied the _instant_ they saw that I was handling a bunch of newspapers, and they promptly drove away.

I could have probably had an old _sticker_ (which, later, I _did_ for a while, with otherwise-surprising-for-Clarks-Summit impunity) and they wouldn't have looked long enough to notice it; that's how satisfied they were to simply see that I was a paper boy. Nor has any cop ever checked me out in the whole going-on-two-years since.

Clarks Summit cops leave paper carriers alone. They leave us alone even when we're doing screwball things like being on the left side of the road. Yesterday, I had just done at least _three_ violations, in full view of one (and at the pre-dawn hour that it still was, he didn't have anything other than me _to_ watch, during the whole half minute that I'd been doing them), when he drove right by me: I had operated on the left side of the road _at_ an _intersection_ (which in my opinion ought to make it count as two violations instead of one), _opened_ _federal_ _mailboxes_ (which, I was always taught, is a federal crime, although, for the handful of customers that specify that we do just that, I just assume that that's an exception), and failed to signal.

(I'm also a big promoter of _obeying_ traffic laws, especially at http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm , but I'll be doing enough spouting of that on this blog soon enough. Stay tuned.)

About once every several months, I happen to see a cop make a quick pass through the distribution center parking lot when many of us are there screwing around with our papers. I guess that's one of their various methodologies of keeping up with what the various carriers' vehicles look like so that they can leave them alone.

The only time that I attracted a cop enough for him to "really" check me out while I was doing anything having to do with the route, wasn't even during any delivery. Rather, it was in the middle of a weekday, in early February 2007, when I was mapping the route out by bike in preparation to do my first delivery that Sunday (as a substitute, which was how I started). I was taking _real_ long (peering at house numbers, stopping to take notes here and there, and then going back to double-check, etc.), which of course, on any suburban cul-de-sac where one is a stranger, was _asking_ to have a cop check me out. But it was fun: The cop instantly understood my explanation of what I was doing, and the rest of the conversation was about things like cycling which, as it turned out, was one of his hobbies, and where could he buy a headlight like mine, etc.

I've done the majority of my subsequent, more-detailed mappings out of the route (a sporadic, ongoing process) by foot, because I quickly learned that that's a much better speed for taking notes about house spacings, etc., than cycling speed.

So anyhow, I was boasting to y'all about how I ameliorated the extent to which I look like a marauder, by usually (since mid-2007) sticking all 180 of the front sections into the bags before leaving the distribution center.

The rare occasions when I don't, are generally when weather conditions are such that sitting in the cab of the pickup truck to stick them in (as opposed to standing outside, which I find more efficient) becomes tempting even for me.

And yesterday, with the temperature a little bit below 0 F, was one of those times. _Then_ it's _nice_ to wastefully idle the engine during the time of sticking them in!

Not that that factor alone was enough to give me any excuse, in my opinion, to do so. The addition, rather, of a substantial amount of wind, for example - even at much warmer temperatures - would have provided a more _valid_ excuse to not try to stick them in from standing outside (due to the requirement of wasting, above a certain wind speed, too much time and not-always-successful effort preventing the papers from becoming airplanes), but that excuse didn't happen yesterday either. It was only a _calm_ subzero temperature yesterday.

Rather, some additional factors - the ones that provided a _valid_ excuse - were introduced by the fact that the front sections arrived so late:

First, I've never tried to do arithmetic to figure out which of the two methodologies saves _time_. I've long suspected that my sticking-all-180-front-sections-in-before-starting method might take a hair longer, due to the fact that I'm theoretically handling each one of the papers an extra time (compared to if I were sticking each front section in right in the same fluid motion as when I'm grabbing that paper to run to a house with it - but it's probably unrealistic for that to very often all happen in such a fluid motion, hence my use of the word "theoretically").

(And most carriers, who use cars rather than pickup trucks, probably don't have _room_ in their vehicles for such extra shuffling of stuff around. I suspect that that - coupled with the fact that many of them are more willing than I am to do a whole bunch of idling of their engines, such as in particular, yesterday just to be warm while waiting the extra hour for the papers even though the distribution-center building that some of them finally came into to whine about the heat of is _very_ reasonably-well heated in my opinion! - might explain why most of them use the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method.)

I think I more or less discovered yesterday that the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method _isn't_ any iota faster, at least for me. The fact that I still took until about 8:33 to finish would seem to indicate this. Hmmm, maybe my theoretically-double-handling, normal method is just that - "theoretically" only, on the double-handling part - and my elimination, if any, of "double handling" yesterday was cancelled out by the simple awkwardness that I find in the position of sitting inside a vehicle (which requires swiveling back and forth 90 degrees to stick each front section in) as opposed to standing outside it to stick the front sections in.

My second deciding factor for using the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method yesterday, was to take advantage of the fact that getting the front sections late _didn't_ mean that I had to do all _parts_ of the route late. In particular, the route's one high-traffic street, W. Grove, is always wise to be finished with as early as possible, before traffic starts picking up and making it more time consuming to do. The same principle applies to when 7:30 rolls around: If I know that I'm not going to be finished the delivery yet when 7:30 rolls around, then it's ideal to save some of the front sections to stick in after 7:30 (thereby, _before_ 7:30, spending a little less time sticking sections in and more time delivering), because that way my embarrassment of finishing after 7:30 is confined to in front of a minimum number of the customers.

But, like I said, I _prefer_ sticking all of the front sections in before beginning the delivery. And a too-obvious-to-mention-in-any-of-the-above, additional advantage of doing so is - you guessed it! - it virtually eliminates all of the possible ways of _forgetting_ to stick one in.

Only about once that I happen to know of, had I ever forgotten to stick one in before yesterday. (It was in 2007 sometime, and I saw it on the Times' sheet the next weekend: A certain customer had "Sections A thru D missing." "A thru D" is the "front" section that I'm talking about.) But yesterday, I think there was around _14_ papers that I forgot to stick it into!

Fortunately, I caught myself just after 9 of them, so I knew which houses 9 of them probably were. But, being in a hurry as I was, I decided not to go right back to those 9 houses but rather, to wait until after finishing the delivery (when it'd be daylight also, a preferred time for making an otherwise-suspicious-looking _second_ visit to a house) to go back to them and deliver those front sections.

It was between about 8:33 and 8:45 when I finally did so; so, I must have looked _real_ incompetent: About half of those 9 customers had already taken their paper inside, so I had to putter around doing things like ringing their doorbells, with success only in some of the cases, to let them know that I'd finally "remembered" to bring their front section.

To top it off, one of them informed me that I'd forgotten his _whole_ paper! (I _think_ it was only at _that_ house that I was _that_ stupid, based on my lack, as usual, of any measurable number - besides one, which I gave him - of leftover inside sections.)

In that connection, I'm happy to report that it's been a long time since I've missed more than about one house every month or two and that it's usually been more like two months. Back when I was a newbie, I missed at least a couple of houses per average week.

I found out an hour later where it was that I'd forgotten one more of the front sections: The customer called my cellphone when, fortunately, I was still in town and could bring him one promptly. (I usually _am_ still in town for a long time after finishing the delivery, due to my McDonald's habit, and therefore, I like it when customers call me.)

I hereby apologize in advance to whatever 4 or so (based on the number of front sections that I had left over) customers it was that, as I'll learn in detail on the Times' sheet next weekend, I forgot to give front sections to. I hope that they called the Times, and that the managers delivered them as part of their routine cleanings-up after us bums.

I've often pipe dreamed about how, one of these times when I know that the front sections are going to be late, I could perhaps get a head start by delivering just the inside sections to a certain chunk of the route, and then come back later to deliver the front sections, with a goal of thereby delivering everything including the front sections within the deadline (because the front sections by themselves are much lighter and could therefore probably be delivered fast). But _if_ I were to ever try that, just one of the challenges that would be involved would be that I'd probably want to first print up a bunch of copies of a simple note, _saying_ what I'm doing, to stick into each inside section (that's just one of the disadvantages of this scheme: just sticking _these_ in would take a big chunk of time) so that early-rising customers would know that the front sections are on the way.

Speaking of the fat inside sections (which are available for carriers to prepare on Saturday): I usually just sit back in Lenoxville on Saturday and let my more-local-to-Clarks-Summit, Route Associate do that "getting tomorrow's paper today" part of the job, a big chunk of which must consist of worrying about when _those_ sections (frequently, the last I checked) arrive at the distribution center much later on _Saturday_ than they're supposed to.