Newspapers... Supply your carriers with cars!

My mother delivers newspapers for the Northwest Florida Daily News. She's 74 years old and has a great arm. She can toss a paper over the car and it can land on your doorstep.

So, this morning, she is delivering the papers as she has for the last 12+ years. She drives on the left side of the road to get to the newspaper box and deliver the paper. Now, she's normally delivering papers between 3am and 6am. So, there's nobody really on the road.

A police officer pulls her over and says she is not allowed to drive on the left side. She explained that this is the only way to do this efficiently but nonetheless he said, "You can't drive on the wrong side and this is a warning. If you do, I will give you a citation." So, she said okay and proceeded to go around him on what she always thought was a circle drive to get to this one box. He immediately turns on his lights and asks for her license, registration, the usual thing. She got a $133 ticket! She tried to tell him that she was trying to get back on the right side of the road but he would simply yell at her saying, "Tell it to the judge!"

So, this afternoon she calls the newspaper and they say there's nothing they can do for her. She got cited, too bad. She called the officer's boss and he said "You cannot drive on that side of the road." and even said that the US Postal Service drives on the correct side! DUH! They have cars with the driver on the right side. His response was that the Northwest Florida Daily News should supply cars to their paper carriers.

This is unbelievable. For 12 years she has been delivering papers and now she's going to have to take double the amount of time it normally takes her because every 10 feet she will have to stop and get out of her car to deliver papers across the street from her.

I told her the Daily News should do a story on this and put it into the public like a Op-Ed piece. It probably won't happen but I'm submitting this to them anyway. In my humble opinion, the paper should at least be supporting their carriers when they have ridiculous issues like this rather than telling them too bad.