Last Day at UPS
I put my two weeks in at UPS in the middle of last month. I have been wanting to write about that, but I’ve had severe blogger’s block lately. Now it’s been so long that I am actually done with UPS. This Friday was my last day there.
It was weird leaving UPS. For so long it had sucked. It was definately a hard job, and it challenged me and my desire to always keep a positive attitude about work. The environment in the sort facility is dirty, smelly, and usually hot. During my last days it was cool though. The winter cools the place off well, and the machinery generally kept it from being too cold.
When I was working as a sorter I was able to talk to people during work. All you really do as a sorter is stand by the belt, grab a package and look at the shipping label, determine which belt to put it on, and then move the package to that belt. It’s cake. Well, cake except for the fact that you are doing this really quickly and the boxes range from 2 to 72 pounds.
When I first started at UPS I was a loader. I thought this was a cool job to have at UPS, and it was. I missed it for a while. I got a scanner. I got to be in a truck by myself for a whole night and daydream while I worked out and got paid for it. The downside of all this though, was that being inside the feeder was dirty. Not the kind of dirty that you get when you roll around in mud though. This dirty is the kind that gets under your finger nails, through your shirt, and deep into your skin. I had to use one of those loofa thingies to get the dirt off. Oh, and it also got on your face and in your nose.
So, I became sorter. I got moved from $9/hour to $10/hour and received $150 in Visa bucks or whatever they were. Being a sorter was cool because there were all these people to talk to every day. And every conversation was a one-on-one conversation with the occasional group of three. Both of those kind of conversations can make for some great talks.
It took a while for all that to fall into place though. When I first got onto the sort aisle everyone was pretty much quiet. They all kept to themselves. No one really talked to me much, and that made me kinda miserable for about a month. After a while though, a person would leave here and there and then new guys would come. They wanted to talk too, and they usually needed help for the first few weeks. I was helpful. I worked hard and could easily take on a little more, because I was trying to be as fast as the best sorters on the sort aisle.
Being good at my job, helpful to new people, amiable, and talkative really helped me make a lot of friends. After about three months I knew just about everyone on the sort aisle. Some of the really senior sorters still didn’t talk to me, but that was like 3 or 4 people out of 40+ people. Having all these people to talk to on a daily basis in what were essentially forty-five to fifty minute increments made for a fun night at work on most nights. Most people complained if this or that happened at work, but I was always happy because there were interesting people to talk with.
At UPS I got a chance to talk to and get to know people I would have never really interacted with otherwise. I talked with people from Haiti, Poland, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and all over the US. I also got to know city kids from the Orlando area who were born and raised within about 20 minutes of the UPS hub.
On my last day, I had a lot of these guys tell me that they were going to miss me in some way or another. It was kind of funny for me, because these are the kind of guys that have the hardened exterior that you’d get from being a city kid or having to work crappy jobs like this one for most of thier lives. So, when they came up to me at break, or during work, or even at the end of the night… they would allude to missing me for the most part at first, and then I’d just say I was going to miss him (or her in a few cases) and I’d get a laugh and a, “yeah, I’ll miss seeing you around here too” or something like, “Yeah, it was always good to talk to you.”
So, I left work on Thursday and on Friday feeling pretty sad, but also pretty good. I knew I was going to miss having so many different people to talk to, learn about, and sometimes even help out. I also knew that this was probably one the best I’d ever been at making new friends in my life. I made roughly 35-40 new friends in a matter of 20-30 weeks. That’s pretty good for me. Some of them I will even keep in touch with too, because I have hung out with them outside of UPS. Although, I guess that will be a lot harder now that I am moving to Gainesville.
This will be the first time in my life when I am moving from a place where I have a lot of friends to a different place where I have a lot of friends. I am so confused as to how I should feel about all of this.
I guess in the end it doesn’t really matter all that much where I end up. After a year or so I will likely have a few friends where ever I go. That’s something that’s really cool about life. We are all able to find friendship where ever we are.