Leave the snooze-shortening to us

Greyhound likes to boast, "Leave the driving to us", but how many of their drivers would last very long as a paper boy?

In my sporadic riding of Greyhound (of which I've done none lately) I've been impressed with how they can maneuver, as if they're driving an economy car, in and out of cities so congested I wouldn't want to drive anything bigger than a bicycle into them. But we as paper boys have to be pretty slick too at maneuvering our vehicles around.

For example, despite all of the still-slowly-increasing number (as I've sporadically boasted in this blog) of sections of the route where I park the Frost Farm's pickup truck in relatively few places (from which to do up to 16 or so houses at a time by foot or occasionally by bicycle, for those of my valued readers who may have just hopped aboard), there are still a few places where it saves time to simply maneuver the pickup truck in and out of the customers' driveways or similarly-tight spots one by one. Although paperboys'/girls' vehicles aren't as big as Greyhound's, we do need to be coordinated in other ways that Greyhound drivers don't, such as delaying putting on the brakes until late enough to let the vehicle's forward speed add speed to a forward-thrown paper while still early enough to avoid bashing into the customer's garage door.

Another one of the skills that a paper boy needs (at least on the occasions when we've failed to get enough sleep the night before - like me this morning when I'd waited until the last minute, Saturday night, to prepare the carrier-collect envelopes again) is picking a spot at which to stop and take a snooze in the pickup truck later on Sunday morning (after finishing the route and going to McDonald's but before driving all the way home). The flea market, Weis and Lackawanna State Park are among my favorite places to take this apre-paperboying snooze; it depends largely on which destination I wish to frequent that morning anyhow.

This morning, the place where I did it was a "destination" only in the sense of the word "destination" that I use in "The First Pennsylvania Interstate Highway Cycling Permit" (a homemade-in-1989 document that - as I think I can be found in the archives somewhere of the Chainguard yahoo group boasting about - I used in conjunction with my bicycle to access it, despite the "Motor Vehicles Only" sign on the on-ramp to it, when I was an Attendant there in 1989): The Tompkinsville I-81 rest area.

This morning, as I snoozed at that rest area at around 10am or so (I guess a study of a Greyhound northbound-to-"Syracuse" schedule would always be one way of jogging my memory about the exact time, if it had been a "real" hit and run), what did I get awakened by but a sideways bump. For the first few seconds, I thought it might be a bunch of punks trying to roll the Frost Farm's pickup truck over onto its side (one reason I'd locked myself inside it before going to sleep). But no; what did I see out my right-rear quadrant but a big wall of blue. And then I saw it backing up, far enough to bring first the dog emblem and then the "Syracuse", into view, which reminded me that blue is Greyhound's new color.

Not an iota of damage! That was surprising, since my rear bumper took it in the direction in which it's weakest, namely diagonally (I was diagonally-parked and the "professional" was trying to parallel-park). I walked out and looked at it after the "professional" did, because it took me a minute to wake the rest of the way up. During that minute, my tinted rear glass was fun in that I could see him and the worried look on his face without him seeing me, although he also had plenty of opportunities to see me during the several minutes before I left. It's interesting to note that he seemed to pretend not to notice that I was anywhere around, because that way he avoided having to apologize for waking me up.

Other paper-carrier forums

Here's one that I just joined: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newspapercarriers