10-4 Magazine
KEN'S KORNER - SEPTEMBER 2006

FRIDAY FEVER SYNDROME
BY AUTHOR, EDUCATOR & DRIVER KEN SKAGGS

Did you ever notice how terrible traffic is every Friday? Did you ever wonder why? It doesn’t matter where you go in this great country, for some reason(s), everybody and their brother comes out of the woodwork every Friday afternoon. I’ve always had my own theory about why, but I never really knew how I could prove it until recently.

It’s not like I really, scientifically proved it. I like to think that I politically proved it (political proof, a term I’ll coin here, is when you set out to prove an idea and ignore all other proof and just focus on the so-called proof that backs up your own opinion). The idea came to me because of the job I wound up doing over the past four weeks.

A lifelong friend of mine, who is an owner operator, decided to take a month off and let me drive his truck so he could take a much-needed vacation. The timing couldn’t have been better for me and I think he knew that and took advantage of the situation, but I’m glad he did. It took him three years to pay off his truck and he wanted to celebrate by taking those four weeks off and spending some quality time with his wife in Canada, where he could escape the hot weather and do some serious fishing. Luckily for him, she likes to fish too. They had a wonderful time in Canada and caught some amazing fish while there, but that’s another story.

While they were enjoying the great outdoors, I was making fifteen to twenty pick-ups in one city and fifteen to twenty deliveries in another, every other day or two. I never knew how hard he worked until I actually drove his truck and did his job. It felt good to be driving again after having not done it for a few months, but the novelty wore off after a week. I’ve done a lot of city driving and a lot of over-the-road driving, but this job was both at the same time. The challenging part was the fact that I was in a different city almost every time. It was well worth the money to purchase a city map everywhere I went. I now have a small collection of them.

Although I was driving a big truck, some of the deliveries and pick-ups I made were just envelopes or small packages. If I had a pickup truck in my trailer I could have saved a lot of fuel money. Many of the deliveries went to downtown office buildings, where I would have to double-park the truck and carry the packages on a two-wheeler up an elevator. It reminded me of my early driving days, working for a messenger service in Chicago, except this time it was any random city. I was glad that some of the deliveries were in Chicago - at least I know my way around there.

After a couple of weeks, I started getting the same stops over again so those were easier to find on the second or third time. I really learned my way around places like Cleveland, Detroit, Omaha, Denver, Dallas and Atlanta. No matter where I was, every Friday, without fail, I wound up in a big city wondering how in the heck I would get all of the stops done in the outrageous traffic.

Somehow, I always managed to get my deliveries done, but those were some long hard days. It had me wondering why Fridays were always so jammed up everywhere. On the third Friday, I decided to take an impromptu survey and ask people why they thought it was so bad. I wound up asking about ten people in Detroit, another ten or so in Atlanta, and of course my friend Paul the day he got back.

My original theory was that most people got paid on Fridays, so naturally they’d be out shopping or partying, going to the bank and running around paying their bills. A few people confirmed this idea, so I was satisfied that I was right about that, and I still think it’s the number one reason Friday is so crowded out there. I also found out that many salespeople, who generally work out in the field, come into the office once a week to get paid - on Friday, of course. One armored car driver told me he only worked on Thursdays and Fridays. I saw one group of employees sharing a pizza and realized that Friday was probably the busiest day for pizza deliverers.

Okay, so a lot of people drive on Fridays. But, there is another part of this scenario that helps make it the huge problem that it is. For some reason, even though traffic is at it’s worst, people seem to be in the biggest hurry on that day. I understand that most of them have worked all week and they want to get home and relax for the weekend, and who can blame them for that? But what a lot of them don’t realize is that when they try to hurry, they actually make it worse for themselves and everybody else.

They make it worse, because when you hurry you get tense and easily aggravated because you have to constantly stay on your toes, ready to pounce on the brakes or switch lanes in a flash if you think the other lane is moving better. In this tense mode, you are less apt to let someone cut in front of you and more apt to tailgate, which of course leads to even more stress for you and those around you. That’s why I call it Friday Fever, because it’s a mindset. Just remember this - if you don’t let someone in front of you and they don’t let you in front of them, no one will get anywhere.

It was a tense four weeks for me, peaking out every Friday afternoon in that terrible big city traffic that just seems to get worse and worse. I’m just glad it’s over. It gave me great pleasure to hand the keys back to Paul. And I thought I was the big city driver!

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