Fleet Replaces Driver Lounge Couch for First Time Since 1994; Drivers Report Feeling 'Unsupported'
The old couch had shaped itself around three decades of 34-hour resets. Its replacement has firm cushions, clean fabric and no history whatsoever.
A regional fleet stunned its drivers this week by replacing the driver lounge couch, a brown-and-orange plaid sofa that had been in continuous service since 1994, logging an estimated 41,000 naps, 9,300 detention-time sulks and one documented marriage proposal.
The new couch arrived Monday on a pallet, still wrapped in plastic, and was immediately treated by drivers as a suspicious load.
"It doesn't know us," said one driver, who asked not to be named because he was still deciding whether to sit on it. "The old one knew exactly where my left hip goes. This one just sits there being firm."
A couch with a past
Fleet records show the original couch was purchased the same week as the terminal's first fax machine and outlasted it by 31 years. Over that time it absorbed coffee, ketchup, diesel and an unidentified blue substance that maintenance listed in a 2008 report simply as "the stain."
Safety managers had flagged the couch in seven consecutive audits, mostly for the spring that had worked its way through the middle cushion and now pointed toward the dispatch office "like a compass."
"We kept meaning to replace it," said a terminal manager. "But every time we tried, someone was asleep on it, and you don't wake a driver who's on a reset. That's how you lose a driver."
Adjustment period
Management has scheduled a 15-minute "transition huddle" to help drivers bond with the new couch, which will be held, for lack of other seating, standing up.
Drivers have responded by draping a jacket over the new cushions, leaving a half-finished coffee on the armrest and dropping a single french fry between the cushions, in what one veteran called "breaking it in the right way."
Early results are mixed. By Tuesday afternoon, the new couch had recorded three naps, two complaints and its first unexplained stain, which maintenance has tentatively labelled "the stain, part two."
The old couch has not been thrown out. It was last seen in the shop, where mechanics say they are "just holding it for a while" and have already worn a new groove into the left side.