DRIVING FOR DOLLARS

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Find one or two reliable substitute drivers and teach them the route as soon as possible. If you call on them at short notice, pay a bit more than an apportioned amount of your own check. Many house or farm-bound country people who don't want the burden of daily driving will jump at the chance to get out once or twice a week—while you go to the dentist or take a welcome day off.

Exercises

Be warned: paper-route driving provides uneven athletic exercise. Paper bundles are heavy; keep your back straight and lift with your legs. Driving a conventional left-steering vehicle on the right-hand side of the road, you will be delivering right-side-of-road papers out of the passenger window. After a few days of feeling sore, you'll develop an easy stretch rhythm. But, with so much sitting and lifting, you may develop back aches. Doing the "truck drivers workout" (the pelvic tilt) as you drive—tightening stomach muscles and pulling them in against your backward-arched spine, pressed into the seat back for successive counts of 10—will help.

Many drivers run along the left side of the road to deliver left-side-of-road papers out of the drivers' side window, or weave from side to side for tubes located on both margins of a road. Country police usually look the other way on less-traveled roads, even if weaving is against traffic laws. Best advice is: don't drive to endanger.

Experienced route drivers never quit rolling except for stop signs. Indeed because starting causes 99 percent of the wear on an engine and takes more gas than several minutes of slow idle, they don't even turn the car off from start of the route to the end—and run up a quarter-million miles on an engine before major repairs are needed. They locate tubes so they can shoot papers on the fly, relocating tubes out to the roadside to avoid turn-ins to driveways and other time-losing and transmission-and-brake-wearing drops.

However, if you try to stuff papers on the fly at a too-brisk speed, you may catch your hand in a paper tube or snag a sleeve on a stake and wrench your shoulder. Or, shooting it out fast (without any way to follow through), you can hyperextend an arm joint. Too many extensions or wrenches and you can develop serious joint and muscle problems in wrist, elbow, or shoulder. Take your time, slow to a near stop at each delivery so you can stuff the paper with an easy flowing motion.

One vehicle part that can wear quickly is your window regulator—made to be cranked up and down once or twice a day, not 200—so in cold weather, dress warmly and leave the windows down if you can. You make best time, use less fuel, and extract the least from your vehicle if you go at a quick but deliberate pace using brakes as little as possible. But be ready to stop and help round-up got-loose livestock or help get in a field of baled hay if rain is threatening. Stop and chat with your customers, too. The "paper boy or girl" is often the only stranger isolated country folks see in a day. And be alert if a lone or elderly customer fails to pick up the paper; route drivers are often the first to know if a senior has become ill.

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