Light Bulb Quest
Some of the people delivering your holiday packages are only around for a few weeks – but the work they do, and the lives they lead, stay with me. Every year during the holiday ‘Peak’ season, United Parcel Service employs thousands of temporary workers to help get packages delivered on time. If you live in […]
Peak holiday season has officially begun! And with the surge in online shopping there are even more delivery vehicles out on the roads than ever. You might soon spot something unexpected in a parking lot or on a side street near you: two trucks pulled close together, drivers transferring packages between them. (If they’re parked […]
The National Retail Federation estimates that holiday spending this year will reach a new record of somewhere between $980-989 billion. That’s almost a trillion dollars – in the U.S. alone! (A trillion is a one followed by twelve zeroes.) Meanwhile online shopping, estimated at between $295-298 billion, represents nearly one-third of that total. These figures […]
Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 5th, is Election Day here in the United States. With the presidential race a toss-up, no one can say with any certainty what the outcome will be – or even when. Tomorrow is uncertain for me at work too. The handful of drivers still on layoff in my UPS facility have all […]
My wife Bethany and I have been together for a long time. Today is our twenty-ninth Valentine’s Day as a couple. Twenty-nine years. That’s long past the candy-and-flowers stage. Past even the Valentine cards stage. Ours was never a storybook romance. We married young and started a family early. A child with special needs. Job […]
It’s 2023! Like a lot of people on January 1st, today I find myself reflecting on the year that has just passed and considering the year that lies ahead. I’m a big fan of observing milestones. Crossing a finish line is a big deal for me – always an accomplishment worth celebrating. But as a […]
Thanksgiving two years ago I shared my thoughts about what I was thankful for as a new package car driver for United Parcel Service. Then last year I observed Thanksgiving with a reflection on how the supply chain is really a global chain of human (inter)activity bringing our purchases all the way to our front […]
Happy November! I see the day after Halloween as the first day of the holiday season. Time to start enjoying Christmas music again! Recently I gave five simple reasons why I love being a UPS driver. Since then I’ve thought of a few others, including this one: I make people happy, all day, every day. […]
In the U.S. over my lifetime, Labor Day has served chiefly as a three-day weekend bracketing the ending of summer break from the beginning of the school year. I myself never gave much thought to the holiday until I started researching its origins. All across the country, all throughout the industrial era, the history of […]
You might assume from the name of this blog that my favorite part of the holiday season is all the lights. That’s a perfectly reasonable guess, but it happens to be wrong. Instead, my favorite part of the holiday season is the music. Like my affinity for light bulbs, my love of Christmas music drives […]