The Hidden Alcoholic Behind the Wheel
By Stefan Vogt
When I was still working in operations, part of my daily routine involved meeting every driver at the end of their shift. They’d come to me in the afternoon to hand over their paperwork—delivery confirmations, signatures, the usual logistics documentation.
One particular day, I was standing outside the depot, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the drivers to return, when a police car pulled up. This wasn’t a common occurrence, so immediately, I felt that knot in my stomach—the one every operations manager knows all too well.
Two officers approached me directly. “Is this one of your drivers?” one of them asked, pointing to a photo.
I recognized him immediately. “Yeah, yeah, that’s one of ours,” I confirmed, already dreading what was coming next.
“OK,” the officer continued, “he was doing one of the tours in the Eifel region, and we made an alcohol test. He had 3.3 per mille.”
For those who don’t know, 3.3 per mille (or 0.33% BAC) is more than four times the legal limit in Germany. This wasn’t just having a beer with lunch—this was serious intoxication while operating a delivery vehicle on public roads with our company’s name plastered all over it.
It turned out he was a hidden alcoholic, and nobody knew. Not his colleagues, not his supervisors, not me—and I was responsible for all the drivers. He had managed to hide his condition while driving a commercial vehicle carrying valuable shipments day after day.
What’s particularly troubling is that if the company had been using tracking technology, they might have noticed warning signs long before the police caught him. The trackers would have shown a pattern of erratic driving—perhaps excessive speed, harsh braking, or unusual routes. The shipments themselves might have registered being tilted, shocked or damaged because of his wild driving style.
Management could have noticed something was wrong before it escalated to the point where law enforcement had to get involved. Instead, we were left dealing with the aftermath: a driver facing criminal charges, a company vehicle impounded, undelivered packages, and of course, the potential reputation damage.
Mistakes like this—or rather, situations like this that go undetected—are happening every day in logistics operations around the world. For every driver caught by police, how many others are out there putting themselves, other road users, and valuable cargo at risk?
If we’d had some kind of technology that alerts us when a vehicle is being driven erratically or when packages are being handled roughly, we could have identified the problem before it became a crisis. Technology can’t catch everything, but it can certainly help identify patterns that human supervision might miss.
In logistics, you’re only as good as your weakest link—and sometimes that weakest link is hiding in plain sight, behind the wheel of your delivery truck.
