After my initial six months, “I took the tie” and became the sup at a group of “doors” at which trailers got loaded for Connecticut cities and towns. Being the sup and no longer a Teamster was a strange role change. I now worked physically just as hard as everyone else, but I loaded less and cleared jams of packages from conveyor belts and chutes more. I was also the cheerleader. Being the cheerleader may sound like I was the beat keeper on a galley, but it was the role of encourager, emotional support, and safety advisor. Knowing when to pull someone before they injured themselves through fatigue, and put them into a less demanding role while they rested was critical. Oh no, we couldn’t call a halt except at designated break times. But, only a foolish supervisor worked the team to fatigue fueled injuries. And I knew more than a few fools.
Even though I wasn’t supposed to, I often worked alongside my Teamster colleagues. It was that or get “buried in the load.”
Packages move about the hub on long conveyor belts. Where necessary, the process is interrupted by sorting isles that divide the flow into more defined destinations. The long line of packages made the trip from the Primary ( where trailers got unloaded) to my loading doors by a roundabout route. Most had been sorted twice, shoved around curves by powered arms, called diverters, and then been “picked” by a trained sorter who further sent the packages tumbling down chutes to the correct trailer. Then the deluge was on us.
We hustled, but there were many tons more to get moved than there were workers, and there arrived a spot in many shifts when the packages’ ratio to loaders became favorable to the packages. Then our work area looked more like the after-effects of a parcel hurricane.
At that time, half the rest of the hub could start hearing us. Singing, telling wild stories, running through weird work chants that we made up on the spot—doing impromptu dances around heaps of packages. We had a reputation for crazy in a workplace that was crazy.
A motto seen frequently at UPS was the truism that ” when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” For my crew, our variation was, “when work gets weird, we get weirder.”
What can I say it got us through the tough times.
2 Replies to “The House Of Pain”
Comments are closed.
Weird would have worked for me.
The hub looked like a modernist reinterpretation of Dante’s inferno. and that’s what it seemed like sometimes.