Tuesday, August 14, 2007
UPS
Posted by Zach in News Stories

Few things say monotony like a job at UPS. I used to work at UPS as a package handler. As my distance for the job has grown, my recollections have developed an almost nostalgic patina. It’s not so much that I think, my what a wonderful job that was. Rather, I think, my how wonderful that I worked such a terrible job. Every night I left my apartment at 10:15. At 10:25, I pulled into the parking lot, shut off my car and savored the last few moments of stillness. Then, I grabbed my water jug and headed for the security house with the other “hourlies”. UPS machinery is hard on clothing, and the crowds that enter the hub every night exhibit a type of fashion that is generally reserved for the menacing extras in zombie movies. Now that I think of it, it seems convey the thing exactly: a crowd of mindless, tired, staggering people, wearing clothes that exhibit the signs of remarkable violence. Patches on patches. Ripped sleeves. Pant legs nearly shorn off. Back pockets peeling off.

We shuffled from our cars to the guardhouse, showed our IDs, and waited for the largish security woman to nod us through. More often than not our arrival interrupted her reading, and she never made the slightest effort to conceal her irritation. She had an almost insatiable appetite for lurid romance novels with titles like “Voo Doo It Like That: A Scandalous Tale of Urban Desire and Sensuous Vampiric Adventure.” I perceived it as a special type of cruelty that we had to solicit the largish woman’s approval before we could proceed to the job we hated. Anyway, we continued to the “Hub” amidst grumblings as predictable as an Episcopalian liturgy.

“How you doing?”
“Great, till I came here.”
“I hear that.”
“Two more days.”
“Yeah. You double today?”
“No, but I heard Twilight got ransacked.”
“[expletive]”
“Two more days.”
“I hear that.”

The inside of the “Hub” was as drab and boring as a bucket of oatmeal. Everything was steel grates, concrete, dented metal, and corners piled with dust. It was a nightmare of repetitive grimy geometry. Night after night I walked through the maze of chutes and conveyor belts, and every night seemed the same. The memories have lost their particularity and blend into one monotonous recollection—with a notable exception.

One night I left my apartment the regular way, arrived the regular way, showed my ID in the regular way, and entered the building in the regular way. But when I turned the corner what had for nine months been a concrete floor, cinder block wall, and metal chute, was magically transformed. The forms were still there, but they were now beautifully soft and white. Someone during the twilight shift knocked a fire extinguisher from its hooks. It fell, bounced off the bay platform, hit the ground, and exploded. The blast covered the chute, the bottom of the conveyor belt, and about twenty feet of the floor in what looked like freshly fallen snow. I must have come very soon after the extinguisher burst, for there were no footprints. The aesthetic was almost overpowering. I stood in my tattered clothes holding my water jug while a the winds of beauty stroked my brain.

Fitzgerald, I think, once mentioned that in life every person searches for reincarnations of a former aesthetic experience. The writer or painter tries to approximate some moment in their life when they had very real contact with awe. Isn’t it strange that while those moments are widely incommunicable, sometimes a few particles can make the journey to another? It works finest when we see the rapid flicker of the familiar and the unfamiliar. At any rate, I think that at its best, literature or maybe art in general, can take something quite ordinary, concrete and dull, and blast it with a spectacular whiteness so that we can see the thing again for the first time.

One Response to “UPS”

Julie KA comments:
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

Beautiful, Zach. I have been sitting at work perusing my usual blogs to relieve the mind-shriveling boredom that inevitably comes from computer work. I was not expecting to suddenly, if vicariously, experience the awe of a fresh snow in a warehouse. Seriously. I got chills. Thank you.

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