His Way on The Highway: 35-Year Floridian UPS Veteran Driver Has Seen It All
Talk about spending your life on the road. Bill Thompson, today a Royal Palm Beach, Florida, resident, was hired almost 35 years ago by UPS Inc. to drive one of the company’s ubiquitous brown package delivery trucks. Since then, he estimates he’s driven more than 2 million miles.
“At the time, I was working in construction,” Thompson said recently. “I thought being a driver would be more fun. It was.”
Thompson was one of those holiday season hires — people companies employ to help handle the crush of seasonal consumerism. Back then, the vast majority of shoppers purchased items at stores, and with a smaller percentage buying from catalogs, thus the package delivery.
UPS ranks No. 1 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers.
The world has changed, and Thompson has seen that change from the vantage point of the driver’s seat.
For starters, there is a lot more commerce taking place today — and a much more varied commerce at that.
The vast majority of packages he’s delivered are pretty standard, boxes like the ones we all send and receive. But there are some oddities.
One of those is live Maine lobsters. They raise a bit of a raucous in the truck.
“You can hear the lobsters scratching,” he said. “It’s from the claws as they move around in the boxes.”
He’s also transited live crickets, which are harvested for sale in bait shops. And then there’s the gold.
Some years back, Thompson arrived at a local jewelry store to pick up a delivery — 50 heavy packages bound for New York City. He later found out the grueling call amounted to 2,500 pounds of gold, he said.
About a decade ago, Thompson swapped his package delivery routes for longer-haul tractor-trailer driving. He said it’s lengthened his career behind the wheel.
“It’s just a lot less wear and tear on the body,” he said. “When I was delivering packages. I’d be jumping in and out of the truck 130 times, 140 times per day. Now it’s more like six or eight times a day. That’s quite a big difference.”
A real interesting observation Thompson made during our talk was about the quality of driving in South Florida, or, better said, a view many of us might find contrarian.
Thompson said he hasn’t seen driving habits get worse. In fact, he said, the emphasis on drunk driving has improved safety on our roads and highways.
Sure, he said, there are a lot people texting and driving — which he estimates is as much as 25% to 30% of drivers at any given time. But public awareness of drunk driving, and the crackdown that has taken place since the 1980s, has a positive effect.
To be sure, he still sees the occasional impaired driver, such as one he saw get pulled over after the end of the Super Bowl game in February. He watched that driver swerve in, out and within the lanes until a police officer pulled him, or her, over.
Distracting driving, meaning texting, is a problem. What advice does he give?
“You just always have to watch out for what the other guy is doing,” he said. “”I know how to drive. It’s just anticipating what the other driver is going to do.”
Wise words from a lifetime on the road.
