Light Bulb Quest
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 […]
‘No offense, Martin,’ one of my dearest friends, Dave, was telling me. I’d just started as a UPS driver, and as luck would have it, I caught him at home one day when I showed up with a delivery to his address. I decided to take a ten-minute break to catch him up on my […]
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 […]