You’re not your own boss, but it’s kind of like you are, said Porta Kleen Driver Codi Byrd, who’s based in Piqua, Ohio. “I enjoy it; I love it,” he said. “I was always in construction, so I’m familiar with driving jobs and stuff like that. It’s nice, you’re on your own. It’s really up to you when you’re out there.”
Byrd said the freedom a route driver enjoys comes with plenty of responsibility. He said he arrives at work at 7 a.m. every morning ready to roll, because he took care of all his F-550’s daily maintenance needs the night before. “You get it stocked up, dumped. That way I’m ready to get in here and get out first thing. We have a tablet and it has our route on it. It’s about the same every week,” Byrd said.
The key to success as a Porta Kleen driver is not to rush through the daily route and make sure every portable restroom is as clean as possible before moving on to the next one. “I’ve had people out there sometimes at parks, and be like, ‘Wow, these are really nice,’” he said. “It makes you feel good. I always think, if I’m the one using this, how would I want it to be?”
But the job’s not without its challenges, especially when customers move the portable restrooms to another location entirely. “Some like to move them without telling you,” Byrd said. “They do give us a contact number on the tablet. It helps a lot because you always want to call the contact first before you call dispatch. They’ll kind of direct you to it. If not, you call dispatch and they’ll figure it out for you. So, communication is huge.”
Even then, Byrd said customers usually won’t move them more than five or ten minutes away from the original site, so it’s not that inconvenient. Having experience in construction helps him be more tolerant. He also credits his days as a football player with success as a Porta Kleen driver. “There are 100% similarities between football and being a driver,” Byrd said. “Maybe not the physical aspect of hitting each other, but other than that, in a leadership way. We all work off each other as a team. That’s number one for us, really. If we have a guy call off, we have to follow their route.”
Byrd said the main advantage to preparing each truck ahead of time for the next morning is the equipment is ready to go in case something unexpected happens. “It’s just common courtesy, really,” he said. “If someone does call off or someone’s sick, you have to take that truck.”
Byrd doesn’t play as much football as he used to, but he still enjoys going to the gym every day. “It’s always been a big part of my life. It’s keeps me sane; it keeps me going,” he said. “Also, I like spending time with my family. I’m a big family guy. I don’t have kids yet, I just have me and my girlfriend, doing our thing.”
Since becoming a driver, Byrd said he now has a very different perspective on construction site sanitation. When working construction, he said it was easy to look at a portable restroom and think that it’s just a toilet. “There’s more to it than what some people think. They see ours, and it’s nice and they appreciate that,” he said. “They work long hours and they’re all going to want to use it. We want to give them the best service we can.”