Picture Me Rollin'

As you might expect, driver-facing cameras aren't a pleasure to deal with, and grant ever more power to dickhead bosses.

From two years back, when I was a supervisor at UPS, I have a startlingly clear memory of a conversation I had with a route driver about cameras in the trucks. This driver was a relatively new hire, having come from the lawn care company TruGreen.

A few days prior, I had been sent to another UPS distribution center in the region to conduct a supervised ride-along with one of the drivers there. The first thing I noticed getting into his truck was the camera mounted on the top of the windshield. Thankfully those hadn’t made it to the center I usually worked at. The driver swore the camera only recorded the road and not the cab of the truck. I was skeptical.

I mentioned this to the driver who had worked at TruGreen, and he said there they had cameras that filmed the road, and the driver, at all times. It would chirp at you incessantly about your driving, he said, and it would listen in on you as well. The bosses could see and hear everything you did behind the wheel. I groaned, feeling sympathy pains and also sensing it was only a matter of time until this level of employee surveillance became the norm.

It didn’t take long, as least as far as my work experience is concerned. Three of the four jobs I’ve had since, including my current one, have been driving positions where the company uses a system that records both the road and the driver. I’ve dealt with Samsara. I’ve dealt with Lytx. Who knows how many more pigfucker tech companies there are churning these things out, but I guess I’ll find out in due time.

On one hand, I can appreciate tamping down on dangerous driving practices with huge commercial vehicles that carry weight in the tons. Naturally, these companies don’t actually care about safety, but they do care a lot about potential liability and insurance rates. As with most encroachments on our privacy, the push to alleviate legitimate problems is simply a pretext to open the door for all sorts of other stuff.

For all the messaging from cops and the government about cracking down on distracted driving, I see very little results. Damn near every day on the road, I see drivers zipping along at 40-50 mph, their phone casually held up at eye level, not even trying to hide it. I’ve asked people in passing whether they or anyone they know has ever been ticketed for distracted driving and no one seems to know anyone. I’m sure it happens, as cops will use any excuse they have to harass those they want to harass, but by and large it comes across as an empty threat.

As far as the chirping from the cameras, it takes the following forms:

BOOP! BOOP! FOLLOWING DISTANCE!

A lot of these companies use the Smith System defensive driving technique, which dictates at least four seconds of following time trailing the vehicle ahead. The problem with this is that the vast majority of the other vehicles on the road are not using the Smith System, so when you keep a healthy cushion of space between your vehicle and the one in front of you, oftentimes some reckless asshole will swerve into that space, forcing you to have to slow down even more, lest the camera pester you about the momentary lapse. Fortunately, at least with the current job, the bosses understand the roadways are full of maniacs and let these “infractions” slide. One common feature of these systems is that, each time the camera has to correct you on something, an automated email goes out to the bosses detailing it. Even if you aren’t getting punished, it’s still annoying getting nagged by the camera for something that isn’t your fault.

BOOP! BOOP! PLEASE REDUCE SPEED!

This one is fairly self-explanatory. It’s common for these companies to have trucks with speed governors installed, so it’s impossible to go above 65 mph, meaning you can’t trigger the warning even if you wanted. However, when I worked at the junk company, only some of the trucks had a governor, and some of the other drivers would be whipping those death traps down the highway at a clip of 80 and above, while the camera was chirping at them non-stop. Okay, one might ask, why didn’t the drivers get in trouble for that? I’ll get into that a little later.

BOOP! BOOP! HARSH EVENT DETECTED!

This one gets deployed any time you have a particularly hard brake or you make too sharp of a turn. With some exceptions, this would be the hardest to predict. The cameras can be buggy at times, and every once in a while I’ve gotten the harsh event notification on a perfectly smooth and slow right turn. When the bosses review it and see it’s for nothing, you don’t have much to worry about, though it’s still disorienting in the moment to get chided on false pretenses. You might even say… the cameras create their own distractions.

BOOP! BOOP! DISTRACTED!

My new job has a zero tolerance policy on phone use while the vehicle is in motion. Taking a sip of water or eating while in motion will also trigger the distracted notification, so that has to wait until you’re pulled over as well. The latter point is a bit of a pain in the ass but I can deal. While my new job is chill on some aspects of the position, they are strict on driver safety. Anytime I pull up to a stop sign, my wheels have to come to a complete stop and that speedometer has to hit zero. This naturally pisses off many of the other maniac drivers who consider rolling stops (California Roll, for my West Coast readers) the norm. I’ve had a guy behind me on a two-lane road whip all the way around my vehicle and make a right turn in front of me as I came to a full stop at a sign. It was a dangerous maneuver and I laid on the horn to let him know. He flipped me off and hopefully got into a fiery crash later on.

With regard to supervisors spying and eavesdropping on you in real time, there’s no way for you, the driver, to know how much they are doing it. Invariably, the bosses swear they are not sitting there monitoring you, and they simply have the system in order to go back and review footage in case a crash or something serious happens. You would be wise not to take them at their word, and act accordingly.

At some of the companies that have the cameras, I have good reason to believe the eavesdropping was minimal, or at least the bosses were smart enough to not make it obvious. However, the junk company was another matter. Management at the franchise where I worked was largely composed of recently graduated 20-something frat bros who frequently insisted they weren’t spying on employees, but made it abundantly clear with their actions that they were doing exactly that.

At the junk company, each day a crew would begin the shift with a couple jobs, and management would give them “add-ons” as customers booked throughout the day. This would lead to situations where management would tell crews that they were done for the day and to come back to the warehouse. As soon as you got off the phone with the brass, an add-on would hit your route phone. Depending on how tiring your day had been, this could be psychologically jarring at best and rage-inducing at worst. If you pressed management after the fact, they would play dumb and be like “oh yeah, someone just happened to book a job in that moment. What can you do?” In reality, they got off on fucking with people, and were likely watching with joy as employees got pissed off about being lied to and blindsided when they thought their day was over. This happened regularly.

Management would make sly references to things that were said, presumably in private, in the cab. One guy I was frequently paired with told me about one of the supervisors snickering to him in the office about something I said in the truck and asked him if they liked working with “the angry guy”. At my new job, most days I’m by myself so it doesn’t really matter, I’m not doing much talking. I guess management could be judging me for the podcasts I listen to, but who gives a fuck. At the junk company you’re paired with another guy and you have to do something to fill the air for 8 to 10 hours. So not only do you have to break the ice with a relative stranger, you’re mentally hemmed in knowing your supervisors could be and probably are listening to everything you are saying.

That junk job was a nightmare. Management cut corners training people, would send crews out to dangerous jobs without proper protective gear, had favoritism for days. One warehouse guy got in multiple accidents in company vehicles, including taking the bumper off a coworker’s car, and the bosses did nothing to him because he was a yes-man. You could be the best and most dependable worker - they gave me Employee of the Month my last full month there, in part because they knew I was trying to leave - but if you had a mind of your own, the bosses would torment you with endless pettiness. The cameras are supposedly there for enforcing safe driving habits, but the bosses mostly ignored that utility, hence the other driver flying 20+ mph over the limit and not even getting a slap on the wrist.

As always, you are at the mercy of the bosses. And now they have a new toy to wreak havoc on you, if they so choose.