And now for something completely different: Saturdays at UPS

Monday is the start of a new work week for many people. But unless I’ve been ‘forced in,’ Monday is the second day of my weekend.

Ordinarily, newer UPS drivers like me work a Tuesday-through-Saturday schedule. During the week we work side-by-side with the more-senior Monday-through-Friday drivers. On those days the warehouse feels filled to overflowing with brown package cars and all 200 or so drivers.

Each weekday morning the building and the surrounding ‘yard’ are charged with an energy that’s palpable. Everyone is moving about quickly and purposefully. Drivers are eager to get out on route as soon as possible – especially if they have ‘airs’, packages with a committed delivery time of 10:30 am. Some drivers with package cars parked along the outside of the warehouse might even sneak away before the official start time to get a jump on their deliveries.

Saturdays, by contrast, are completely different. Compared with the rest of the week, Saturdays feel downright chill. There are fewer packages, fewer routes, and fewer drivers.

The energy level is a lot more subdued on Saturday mornings as drivers straggle into the building. We may have already worked 40 hours or more that week, so we’re tired. Even drivers who hadn’t been forced into work on Monday could be running out of DOT hours by that final morning.

The building is mostly dark and still and quiet. Most of the office staff and management are nowhere to be seen, having already started their weekend. Usually only a skeleton crew is overseeing the day’s operations.

The building is still full of package cars being loaded up, but only a fraction of them are ‘hot routes’ going out that day. All the rest are being partially loaded for the following Monday – UPS is always closed on Sundays. Most of the hot route cars are parked along the outside of the building and inside nearest the rollup doors.

If the UPS warehouse could be compared to a high-school campus, then Saturday mornings feel like The Breakfast Club. This is definitely accentuated by the fact that as a group, Saturday drivers are considerably younger – and more insouciant – than their more senior counterparts.

A while ago, the Saturday start time got pushed back from 9 to 10 am, so we’re already starting at least an hour later than during the week. And it’s not uncommon for our package cars to need fueling, so some of us have to queue up at the pump before heading out. Meanwhile, as drivers run low on DOT hours they may not be assigned their own routes; instead their Saturday may begin by offloading packages from one delivery vehicle to another somewhere in the yard.

All this to say, Saturday starts are much more poky than on weekdays. And if the rest of the day isn’t quite as poky, it’s never quite as frantic as a weekday either.

The Saturday service area is restricted to certain zip codes in the metropolitan core. And since many of the businesses we serve are closed on Saturdays, there are far fewer ‘bulk stops’ and far fewer airs requiring prompt delivery.

On the other hand, Saturdays are heavy days for UPS deliveries to area post offices. A UPS driver will drop off hundreds of smaller, lighter, and lower-value shipments to be delivered by mail carriers the following day – unlike UPS, the USPS delivers on Sundays.

Right after coming out of my 30-day trial period as a driver, I was often assigned one of the post office routes on Saturdays. It took me an hour or more to offload and scan all those pieces on the postal loading dock, place them into metal bins, and roll these bins inside the USPS building. Then I drove to the next post office and repeated the process. And then maybe repeated it again at a third post office.

As with the rest of the workweek, over the past two-plus years I’ve had a lot of different Saturday assignments across the service area. Lately I’ve found myself regularly assigned to a route that extends north of the city into the outlying areas on winding country roads and up steep mountainsides.

Many of the younger drivers have told me that they find these extended routes with more miles and fewer stops to be insufficiently engaging; they get bored by all that time behind the wheel. While I too enjoy the faster-paced routes in town, I find this kind of Saturday to be a nice change of pace from the rest of the workweek, and a nice low-key way to wrap it up.

Just this past Saturday I drove a total of 131 miles to make a total of 54 deliveries on this route. Since it’s January, and there’s still plenty of snow and ice on the roads – especially at higher elevations – almost all of that driving was at low speeds, with chains on my rear tires. Having taken a half-hour lunch, I punched out at just after 8:30 pm: a ten-hour shift.

I’m very much looking forward to being promoted to Monday-through-Friday. Those driver positions come with higher pay, more union protections against overwork, and a chance to have my own route. Not to mention more time with family when they’re most likely to be home and available. But still, I’ll miss working Saturdays.

I’ll also miss the convenience of not working on Mondays. Now I don’t have to use sick or vacation time to take care of the many appointments I make for myself, my home, my vehicle, and my pets – basically attending to all the business of life. Then I’ll have to. There’s always a tradeoff.