A Week with UPS

When I think of shipping something by air I think of small boxes from Amazon, an envelope with some important paper that needs to quickly arrive at its destination, or something that is perishable. The run up to Valentine's Day with way more flowers than usual and numerous Shari's Berries boxes reminded me that some people have to rely on air to make sure that all important gift arrives on time. One of the pilots said he had never seen so many flowers - even for Valentine's Day. The steady stream of King Cakes petered out with the beginning of Lent.

Day to day reality is a bit different. The most common boxes come from Amazon and Zappos. Every Wednesday and Thursday we see a series of plastic orange containers with the movie of the week. This week it was Dr Seuss. I wonder at the boxes that declare their contents to be "human tissue." Daily there are little boxes of machinery parts that somehow manage to weight at least 30 lbs. Due to my job of making sure the packages are sorted to the right side of the belt I've learned that the large white boxes of liquid genetics go to the hog farms in the Morris area and anything with Chinese printing is headed for Thief River Falls and the Polaris or Arctic Cat factories. Long rolls of fabric are addressed to Brainerd. Every day we see a few irregulars which is anything that isn't in a box or weighs over 70 lbs. The most unusual one that I've seen was 32 car tires all headed to the same destination.

This week added some excitement to our routine. On Wednesday I arrived to see one of the supervisors talking with two men in suits. I figured they were the auditors we have been warned about and hoped they would move on to another belt by the time we actually started. It turns out they were from Wells Fargo whose truck is at the end of our belt. It was a perfect day for them to watch how things work. The items addressed to Wells Fargo are almost all copy paper boxes and they tend to be rather heavy. If there are too many of them on the belt at once, the weight causes the belt to stop. The only way to get it going again is to stack some of the boxes on the side and put them back on when there is a break in the action. However, there was no break in the action on Wednesday. The Wells Fargo boxes just kept coming. There were so many that the weight stopped the belt that feeds our belt. That had never happened before. I've never seen so many supervisors in one spot. Add to it a 124 piece special for Thief River Falls and a 24 piece special for Grand Rapids and a sub at the position across from me and we had quite the morning. I actually worked up a sweat.