Welcome one and all

Hello, and welcome to Newspaper Nights. This is my little corner of the web to broadcast my life as a paper delivery guy. A friend of mine has a blog covering his job as a pizza delivery guy, and while reading his ups and downs, I realized that I had some stories to tell as well. Whether or not anyone reads and enjoys them remains to be seen, but I suppose I just need to write things down.

First, lets start with a little background and how this job works. I have been back delivering papers for going on a year now. I say "back" because I did this once before for about the last 6 months of 2004. It has its pros and cons, but we'll cover that later. Right now, here's how it works. I arrive at the warehouse at 1:45 am to get my papers for the day. I get my mail covering the previous nights misses, any new starts or stops, and any of my houses that are going on vacation. After pulling my alotment of papers for that morning, I move to my table to bag each individual paper. If I have arrived early enough, I put together the days inserts. See, the paper does not come all put together. No, just the headline, Metro and Sports come at 1:45. The Living, Classified, Cars, Jobs and any advertisements are delivered earlier in the day, and have to be added to the headline. (This is one of the Cons we will discuss later) The put together papers have to be folded together and put into a plastic bag. Said bags are thrown into a cart. Once each paper is bagged, they are loaded into my car. Then the real fun begins.

As the week progresses, so does the number of papers I have to deliver. I run a pretty small route. Monday-Wednesday is about 80 papers, Thursday is close to 100, Friday and Saturday about 110, and around 150 on Sunday. Also, the actual papers themselves increase in size as the week goes on. During the week, all of the nights papers will fit in the passenger side of the car, but by Sunday, the sheer size and numbers fill the entire inside of the car, front and back seat.

My route is in rural Locust Grove, Georgia. It is 54 miles from the warehouse until I throw my last paper, the another 10 back home. Monday-Friday takes about 1 1/2 hours to deliver, while Sunday takes right at 2 hours. Add the time I spend bagging and loading, it equals around 2-3 hours a night, 4-4 1/2 on Sunday. Roughly 22 hours a week.

So that's how it works. Pretty vanilla right. Not always. I'll share the good stuff in my future posts. Thanks for suffering through this first post, it gets funnier.(and weirder)

Coming up on Newspaper Nights:
Cops
Deer (and other roadkill)
Late Night Radio
Bats
Ghosts
My complete disregard for traffic laws

Stay tuned....