Light Bulb Quest
This week’s issue of the New Yorker magazine includes a long-form article titled, ‘UPS and the Package Wars.’ Its subtitle is a lot more provocative: ‘The company offers old-fashioned middle-class jobs and is enjoying record profits. So why is a strike looming?’ And the text of the web link is the clever, pithy phrase, ‘Can […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s almost Christmas already! Compared with the previous two years, this year’s winter holiday season (‘peak’) seems to have flown past! Any other time of the year, the UPS warehouse where I work is largely empty after all the package cars drive away with their loads. By contrast, all through peak, piles of packages are […]
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 […]
For the past several months the eyes of the world have been on Ukraine. In a modern David-versus-Goliath scenario, Russia’s military has met tougher-than-expected resistance from scrappy Ukrainian forces – the entire Ukrainian population, really. Outmanned and outgunned, Ukrainians have nevertheless shown themselves fierce defenders of their homeland against the invading aggressors. What was supposed […]
A while back I shared about some of the things I’d had to let go of, amidst the professional and personal losses of the past few years. In some very real ways my life is harder now than it had been before. But I didn’t share out of any sense of bitterness, disappointment, frustration, or […]
I could be wrong. I feel like it happens to everyone, but maybe I’m the only one. And I feel like it’s happened to me more than once, but one incident in particular stands out. I was in high school at the time. One day, a member of my daily ‘lunch bunch’ carelessly tossed their […]