Yeah, Qwest is the one that does a lot of machine checks. I like the machine checks for exactly the reasons you stated: If your route "flunks" you can usually go into the delivery station and act all outraged (whether you delivered the books or not) and say "It was just people hanging up on the stupid machine." They then have to re-check your route with real human beings doing the calling. If you know there were some "holes" in your route, you can go out and patch them up and pass the second time around.
AS for my adventures with "Yellow Book," today was truely a horrid, bad, no-good day. My latest route is due in tomorrow, but one hell of a winter storm came into Colorado today. I stood out in front of my housing bagging books in the snow. I lost my gloves with the finger-tips cut off and I refuse to mutilate my good ones, so I did the job without gloves. I kept loosing all feeling in my hands and having to go sit in my car for a couple of minutes to get warm. The temperature was around 20 degrees at that point and the wind chill made it around 0 degrees, and it only got worse from there.
By time I had a load of bagged books in my car it was a regular blizzard. I drove almost 40 miles thru the snow to get to my route where the weather was even worse. I had to drive through one and two foot drifts of snow, up and down steep roads with cleverly concealed ditches on either side. A couple of times I almost slid off the road into one, despite the fact that I was in 4-wd. The snow started coming down so heavily that I could no longer read house numbers or street signs, so I gave up and called it a day and drove the 40 miles back home at about 20 mph the entire way.
All this for a lousey 23 cents per book????? I got to thinking about it, and, you know, you can't even get a one ounce letter delivered for that, and those books gotta weigh 5 pounds each! On top of all that, if you get fed up and just hand the route back to them, you don't get paid so much as a dime for what you've already delivered. They pay for a complete route or nothing at all. So if I turned the route back at this point, I'd have delivered 300 phone books for free. I can see why people just ditch the things in the recycling bin. One of my fellow delivery workers told me that the books make great fires, good for keeping warm. I'm STILL cold from todays adventures, and it's a damn tempting thought!
