How driving for UPS led me to true love

Well, I’ve managed to make it through my second holiday (‘peak’) season as a UPS driver.

And since Christmas fell on a Saturday this year, I was blessed with a three-day weekend – my first, I believe, since starting this role. After six-day workweeks throughout most of 2021, I finally have a chance to rest and reflect on my first full year of driving.

What a difference a year makes! Last year I was still in my initial 30-day probationary period for most of peak, unsure of whether I’d even advance to full-time permanent status. I had a single training route that I’d complete each day, then return to the warehouse without being assigned any additional work, lest UPS be forced to ‘buy’ me.

Once I was ‘bought,’ however, I’ve bounced all over as a ‘cover driver,’ filling in on various routes for drivers who were unavailable for one reason or another, and taking on many different additional work assignments. Some weeks I’d cover a different route every day, and other weeks I’d have the same route all week long. A couple times this past year I covered the same route for several weeks or even longer.

I’ve covered all kinds of routes all across the area. North, south, east, west. Downtown, uptown, midtown, small town, middle of nowhere (‘extended’). Industrial, business, residential. Flat, hilly, mountainous. Lakes, rivers, fields and forests. This part of the state is astonishingly diverse in its natural and built environments. I’ve seen it all. I’ve covered it all.

And if I got to cover it for any length of time – say, at least three days in a row – I came to love it, with only a very few exceptions. For me, the more I know about something or someone, the more I can appreciate it. And that appreciation nearly always leads to genuine affection.

Driving for UPS has helped me learn about – and love – specific places, and place in general, in a way and to an extent that nothing else has.

Nowhere is this truer than in my own neighborhood. Since buying a house this past summer I’ve covered routes near and around our new home, including through most of this just-concluded peak season.

That’s right: for much of this year’s peak I was delivering in my own neighborhood, occasionally on my own street – and at least once, my own house.

Navigating not only my neighborhood’s business district and main streets, but also every residential side street and cul-de-sac has helped me gain an intimate knowledge of this place – my place. This in turn has helped me feel more connected and rooted here than any other place I’ve lived as an adult.

Just as this job has changed how I think about time, it’s also changed how I think about space.

I’ve always related to place in superficial, instrumental ways. I’ve treated spaces as things to travel through to get where I need or want to go, or travel to for what I need or want. I’ve always enjoyed the places I’ve lived in and visited, but mainly because of the ‘quality of life’ they provided me.

As a member of the so-called ‘professional-managerial class,’ I internalized the culture that place mattered only in terms of the opportunities it afforded for personal and professional experiences. Consequently over my adult life and career I’ve moved my family twelve times across six states and three time zones.

Then I started driving.

As a UPS driver I’ve come to realize that place matters, independent of what it can do for me. In fact, that’s really what ‘covering’ means: when I’m covering a route, I’m serving a particular space, not the other way around.

It took me a while to truly understand this. I needed others to help open my eyes.

I once asked a customer why they lived where they did, which was many miles away from the nearest town, let alone their nearest neighbor. They replied that their family had been there for generations.

That was when it dawned on me. There’s no such thing as ‘the middle of nowhere.’ Everywhere is the middle of somewhere. The middle – the actual center of the universe to the people who belong in and to that place.

Place matters, then, because of its people.

It is possible for UPSers to request a transfer from their current center to another one elsewhere. But relocating comes at a cost. Although I’d always retain my seniority as a full-time employee, I’d have to start over again with my ‘building seniority,’ effectively going back to the bottom of the list for things like vacations and route selection.

But I don’t plan to move anytime soon. I really love it here.