I have been told that I will be saddled with a "bicycle helper" again this peak. Oh goody.
Just like last year, this guy will take about 50 or 60 of my tight, in-town residentials off of me and deliver them on a bicycle. This is supposed to save me time and miles so that I can be more productive in my extended rural area.
It would be a great idea in I.E. world because in that world the pup trailer that my helper is working out of can be magically teleported out to the delivery area and then back to the building at night, with no involvement from me at all.
But in the real word that I deliver in, I have to tow that pup trailer out there myself. I have to hook it up in the AM, tow it to the area, unhook it, and then go thru the stops and dig out anything that is oversized or too heavy for the guy on the bike to deal with. While I am doing all of this in the AM, another driver in my loop is forced to add miles to his route in order to deliver my NDA that I can no longer get to by 10:30. And then at the end of the night...when I am 10 or 15 miles away at the far end of my loop....I have to drive back there again in order to retrieve the trailer and take it back to the building.
So the bike helper "saves" me a mile or two on my delivery area....at the cost of 10 or 15 extra miles at the end of my day, plus extra miles for the driver who has to cover my air in the morning.
The area that the bike helper delivers is so tight that if he were on car with me we could easily bust off those 60 or 70 stops in around 45 minutes. But instead he will spend half a day doing them by himself on a bike, and the 45 minutes of time he supposedly "saves" me vanishes into thin air when you factor in all the time and miles I waste having to deal with the pup trailer.
My management is well aware of this, but Corporate has given them a quota of bike helpers that they are forced to use, whether it makes any sense to do so or not. Some idiot in a cubicle had himself another bright idea, and he isnt going to let a little thing like reality get in the way of his master plan.
