How I learned to stop worrying and love slinging packages

Ten days after I lost my job, I started a new one. After 15 years in higher education I found myself at Brown. Not the university. Brown, as in United Parcel Service, the global shipping company.

For the past four-plus months my alarm has awakened me every Tuesday through Saturday at 2:30 am. That’s when I’ve been instructed to call in to find out whether and when I should report to work. Business during the pandemic has been booming; I almost always get an answer of yes, with a start time as early as 3:30 or as late as 4:30, depending on package volume.

On those mornings I put on my Carhartts and lace up my work boots, and then I drive quiet empty streets to a hulking facility just off the interstate in an industrial area of Spokane. I arrive to the sight of a few dozen UPS tractor-trailers in the asphalt ‘yard’ surrounding the warehouse, some parked and others being moved to and from large overhead doors.

Meanwhile, during this shift perhaps 100 of the emblematic brown package cars are lined up in neat rows, all facing outward, both inside and immediately outside the warehouse. They stand empty along both sides of a series of conveyor belts that will bring them their respective ‘loads,’ ranging anywhere from 100 to 600 packages per car.

On this early morning shift, the ‘preload’ shift, packages which have been unloaded off the large trailers coming in from various other hubs around the country – some as far as Chicago – are then scanned and sorted onto a maze of conveyor belts snaking the facility. These packages ultimately make their way via a series of chutes, divertors, and human handlers to their assigned package cars to be sent out for delivery that day.

There are a handful of high-volume customers, each with one or several package cars just for them. The U.S. Postal Service. Area universities and shopping malls. Target. And with its new massive warehouse by the airport, Amazon gets an entire trailer all to itself to handle the massive number of customer returns processed on a daily basis. Amazon and UPS were made for each other like peanut butter and chocolate.

On any given morning, anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 packages of all shapes, sizes, weights (up to 150 lbs) and contents move through the Spokane hub during my shift. I’ve seen everything from live crickets to frozen ice cream; from human blood to sex toys. Too many tires and mattresses to count. And of course an endless stream of anything and everything from Amazon, Target, and Costco, each with their instantly recognizable icons on the packaging. Nothing surprises me anymore.

And although this complex logistics system is highly mechanized and automated, it still requires a tremendous amount of human labor power.

The warehouse is so labyrinthine that I actually didn’t realize how many people worked my shift until not long ago when we had an ’emergency evacuation’ (i.e., a drill). Shivering in the darkness of the yard were, by my estimation, somewhere between 150 and 200 people. The shift requires a veritable battalion of unloaders, sorters, splitters, loaders, and a smaller number of specialists to deal with all the various problems and exceptions that arise when moving such large quantities of merchandise.

From the parking lot I walk through a metal detector in the guard shack and take my Coleman cooler across the yard to my assigned work station in the warehouse. This is my new life for roughly 25 hours per week. From the U, to UPS.

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