Newspapers on Saturday

The papers this weekend are much better looking than last weekend’s.  They are in bundles of seven, and not so fat as last week’s.

I write about the paper job sometimes because I do it every weekend; it’s part of my life.  I began by doing what I do now, delivering the Sunday Oregonian First and Final Editions Saturday and Sunday mornings.  After another driver dropped of a stroke, I started doing the daily papers.  Last year I trained to be a school bus driver, and went back to doing the Sundays on the weekend.

For these bigger loads, I use the boss’ stepvan:

I drive this downtown and get all of our papers and then meet driver # 2 and give them theirs.  (we are on the 11th driver #2 since I began this job in 1/04)  We do Commercial deliveries to stores and street racks.

I get the papers off a chute in the plant downtown:

Here, I’ve backed the stepvan into the chute and pulled the belt into the body of the van; it’s MUCH easier to get 1100 papers off the belt than it is to pick them up off the dock in the background…or the floor.

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I will be working this Wednesday night, delivering the Thanksgiving Day papers, which will be the size of Sundays but a dollar less.  We (I) will be getting 1505 of them, hundreds more than the usual Thursday delivery, and this is going to be one of the days when I expect people to be waiting for my papers.

Black Friday sales, ya know.

Usually, one van, a minivan like mine, say, would deliver the daily papers, and they would be "zoned" for the two different counties we have routes in.  My boss owns the routes and manages the sales of the papers at the different stores and racks.  Sales have gone down every year I’ve worked this job, and stops have closed or dried up, but the paper comes out every day and needs delivering, and so I think I’ll likely have a job if I want it for awhile longer.

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It’s not a union job, and in my experience, only a very small number of faces are still the same as when I started this job nearly four years ago.  The staff at the plant stayed the same, but the distributors and drivers have changed pretty constantly.  I have been a reliable guy for my boss; I have been there, on time, more or less, and ready and able to work.

The school bus driving job is a union job, and it’s nice to have a collective say in pay and work conditions… as little as I have to say about it, because I’ve alwasy been a "take it as it comes" kind of guy.  Rather than wishing/hoping/bitching because it’s not kind of guy, the job is as it is, so I have to deal with it.  Like the newspapers.

I like the bus driving job – it’s interesting to see the kids mature and it’s fun to manuver this large yellow box.  It’ll be nice when the contract is approved; it’ll mean a raise and back pay to July, and the relative uncertainty of working without a contract will be gone.

I work pretty much every day, a few hours here, a few hours there.  It doesn’t amount to much more than it takes to pay the bills, but that’s pretty much ok with me; life is pretty low-stress, and I like that.

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