Getting in and out of the truck 200+ times in a day is tough on someone who is not accustomed to that type of impact.
I've never done anything like this before, but I didn't experience anything beyond moderate soreness. It's basically going up and down stairs repeatedly. I never hopped down so that might have helped. I can't tell for sure since I haven't tried both ways to compare it. If you hop, you'll shock load your knees so I wouldn't be surprised if making it a habit of hopping makes soreness worse.
I've slipped and fell on wet leaves more than once before, so I knew jumping off wasn't going to be a good idea.
I work in preload, so as far as I am aware, I did have union "protection" while helping too? If not, someone will correct me.
I'm not entirely sure, but my impression is that not to anything close to the same degree as high seniority full time drivers. Don't quote me on this. Someone with long union experience can explain this better.
There's a guy at my center who did 400 stops by 6:30. They know what's up; they just don't care.
It's hard to tell. If your team gets a helper friendly course with favorable load that lets both of you deliver at the same time for significant amount of time, that is pretty much equivalent to having two drivers. Tight resi with almost every house getting something, one per house and mostly light stuff that you can walk 5-6 stops easy and while you're doing it, driver can go do heavier stuff that needs the truck or both of you can be walking those easy stops at once.
I think getting used effectively works out better than getting used hard by lazy butt. A driver that drops me off at the entrance of dead-end street with light but time consuming signature required stuff and drives off to do heavier stuff at the end of cul-de-sac freed up two solid minutes.
When he's done with the heavy stuff and comes back around, the package is delivered or properly processed as NotIn, stop is completed and ready to go.
Lazy, ineffective driver would drive to the first stop, make me run, go to next stop, make me run again and repeat. He's basically eliminating the leg work, pushing the helper hard physically but not making as good of utilization of time as the first example. This is the only option if the helper can't learn or driver won't allow him to use the DIAD. The helper has to walk more faster overall to make up for the time driver has to spend interacting with customers and operating the DIAD. If you walk slower and wastes five minutes a day, but save 15 minutes by being able to run the DIAD, its win-win. You don't have to work as hard, and as a team you're still 10 minutes ahead. So its obvious that drivers who are willing to do the manual labor in the interest of saving time can have advantage without running the poor helper into the ground.
Those rural courses that doesn't allow the helper and driver to deliver at the same time don't really benefit from helpers and the helper is just predisposed to get "used" by the driver.
