Back to the original topic....
The most frustrating thing about peak for me isnt the workload or the weather or the long hours. It is the chaos and stress that are a direct result of managements failure to plan.
It happens every year; I will have 3 or 4 hours of stops all lined up and ready to bust off, only to get a panicked message from the center telling me to go to the local UPS store or other customer shipping location because "their pickups are super heavy and the regular driver cant contain them".
So I break trace, fight traffic, and make my way across town in order to make service on a pickup that any new hire in a rental truck could do just as easily. My 17 years of area knowledge are wasted, and I wind up having to force 400 or 500 cubic feet of pickup volume in over the top of the 4 shelves full of stops that I have lined up and ready to deliver. And for the rest of the evening I am stuck crawling over or around the bulk volume in order to reach my deliveries.
Newsflash for management people; peak season happens every year in December. Lots of people go to the UPS store to ship gifts and we need to have a plan in place to handle this volume instead of waiting until 15 minutes before their closing time to figure out where the hell we are going to do with it.
I dont mind being given 13 hours worth of work. What I hate....is being given 10 hours worth of work that winds up taking 13 because I am spinning my wheels, driving in circles, and putting out fires that are a direct result of managements failure to plan ahead.