Driving skills: why walk when you can ride?

One of the golden rules of UPS driving in residential areas is to avoid backing out of a driveway onto a street. Avoid driveways at all costs is the best motto. I agree with UPS on this because they have extensive accident statistics to confirm its perils. However, staying out of driveways is more difficult in rural areas where the house is often set back 75-100 yards (or more) from the road.

With a city route I was rarely in a driveway unless it was a very large house with deep circular drives. In these exceptionally wealthy areas, if there were not any visible lines or limbs hanging below my truck height, I drove up to the door instead or parking and walking.

I had always been a very good driver, but in a UPS truck, I was a great driver! Confident in my abilities, given two inches of clearance on either side of me and I could thread the needle without a scratch every time. I could also backup better than anyone I'd ever come across.

Every three months a supervisor would ride with you for most of the day to satisfy company safety standards and document how well you're driving and following UPS rules. One day I got a supervisor I went to high school with, but since then he had become a first-class prick, thinking his job was to be an asshole instead of a manager. We were delivering one late afternoon on the outskirts of town and I passed a house I had a delivery for. I stopped on a dime about 20 yards past the driveway which on the right side of the road; I was going to back in on the blind side which is not UPS policy.

This uptight supervisor insisted I go down the road, turn around, and come back. Hell no, I thought. What a waste of time. I put the truck in reverse and backed into the driveway like Mario Andretti making a pit stop. The reason few people can backup accurately is because they don't know how to use their mirrors. Mirrors on trucks are essential to getting around and if you use the whole mirror, they're your lifeline, saving you time throughout your day. I could judge both distance and height in them, but I noticed other drivers often pointed their mirrors toward the ground so they could always see the curb, or worse, they were maladjusted and virtually useless to them.