Djikstra's For Pool Technicians

The Traveling Technican Problem

For some godawful reason I found myself in 100 degree heat in Florida. It is because more godawfully I lived there. I was looking for a job and didn’t have a job, but what Morrissey missed is that one is more miserable under those conditions.

“Get a STEM degree and you will always have a job” - Some asshole

When I left college with a degree in chemistry, research experience, and specialty knowledge that only maybe a few folks in the world would have at my age - I faced a 16% unemployment rate in the chemical field for those with merely an undergraduate degree. Most of those employed were chemistry teachers, professors, tutors - very few were technicians - and I didn’t want to just know chemistry but actually do it.

So what’s a boy to do for work? I ran up and down the coast from Jupiter to Lantana Road looking for a job as … a commercial pool technician. I got my CPO Certification because it would get me a couple bucks an hour more ($2 to be precise, which means it payed for itself, naturally after about 1 month on the job…). Nobody was hiring though, until I met a kindly man at Palms Pools who gave me a shot.

I loved that job actually - the pay was a joke, but my pay as a scientist was more of a joke, so I actually was doing a lot better than I had been. I was working in the sun every day, using my mind little but keeping myself active and physically well. I learned a lot about good customer service, especially how to keep cool and collected for clients who thought that a green pool is “normal” and that Home Depot sold all the pool chemicals one could ever need.

In any case the worst part of that job was the driving - both from a worker time standpoint and from an environmental standpoint. We already work with heavy chemicals and it does not help to add carbon pollution from hours of driving in this old bucket:

So I decided to do something about it. We all had our daily route sheets, the list of customers requesting us to come by on a certain day of the week. On any given day you had about 20-25 stops to make starting at around 6:30 AM after you go to the chemical distributor, and often ending as late as 4-5 PM if traffic was nasty or you had a lot of repairs to do.

How did I help?

I had heard of this thing called Djikstra’s algorithm, which is a way to find the shortest path between a set of points. I thought to myself, “I bet I could use that to save some gas and time!”

• I took my route sheet and made a google sheet out of it by OCR scanning it in.
• I went to a website to plan routes that might use such an algorithm
• All stops were entered manually per diem to preserve day of arrival, I hit “Sort”

Et voila!!! Each day then was organized in a big rectangular route of stops. I’d start every day at the local distributor and end it at the lot, by going south down the coast and north back up on back streets to save time in northbound traffic.

All said and done I saved 2 hours of driving per day - which was close to about 4 gallons of fuel per day. Not only did I get home faster and have more time to spend with my family, but I saved my boss a lot of money in fuel costs, and the environment a lot of carbon pollution. It was such a good idea, I told my boss how to do it and he implemented it for all the other routes - that’s what I call a win for everyone!