The New Meaning of Time

So in August, 2002, I reported for FedEx Express (the original and your favorite FedEx entity) corporate training. It was two weeks long, I think, Monday through Friday, 7am till 4pm. You spent a week reading, listening, doing funny little exercises on the computer. In fact, I believe you had to test-out at the end of each day. The last few days of training were actually driving. I don't remember so much my first time driving that truck--it's the standard FedEx truck you see a zillion times a year on the road and in about every movie ever filmed in the United States--though I do remember our trainer, Bill I think his name is, teaching us how to do a pre-trip inspection on the vehicle. DOT rules require all commercial trucks undergo a "pre-trip" every day. My hunch is there are lots of trucks that hit the road each day without a pre-trip, but I speak from experience when I say that FedEx drivers do one every day. We were given four minutes each day to do so. A lot of our training time was spent on learning to use the ever-present tracker in the hands of FedEx couriers. In time, you go from an infant unsuccessfully trying to squeeze a square into the circle of that octagon-toy thingie to a fire-juggling magician with it. I say with full confidence that now, four years after I left FedEx, I could still adeptly perform a DEL, PKP, REX, and on and on with that tracker, each in a matter of seconds. It becomes an additional appendage.

At some point during the training, you go to your station to do a ride-along with a current courier. Each courier is assigned to a station, each station covers a specified geographic area. I was assigned to MIC, which I chose. MIC covered downtown Minneapolis and that's about it, and there were 75ish couriers at the station, delivery (morning/afternoon) and pickup (afternoon/evening) combined. I was a delivery courier, which is why half of the year I reported to work in the morning darkness. The ride-along happened early in the training, the premise being that if you were going to freak out and walk away, better to have you do it then than after FedEx had invested a week or two of training in you already. So you show up for the ride-along right in the middle of the sort. Now, the sort is when all of the packages come off the trucks, which come from the airport--in our case from FedEx's Memphis and Indianapolis hubs. Big "cans" of packages are emptied onto conveyor belts, and the appropriate courier picks off his/her packages, loads them onto the truck in the proper place, repeat, repeat, repeat. The sort takes about an hour, depending on volume. On a typical day, I would deliver 250 pieces of freight between 830 and 1030am, spread among 30 or so stops.

Upon first sight, the sort is chaos or artistic, or both. Either way, it is choreographically-mesmerizing collection of movement. You really have no idea, oh the fun.

You leave the station after the sort, at about 8am, your entire truck to be emptied by 10:30am--or your crap is free, of course. It seems like a perfectly impossible task at first. I did my ride along with a super-cute woman, on route 22, which covered three high rises in downtown Minneapolis--hence the "vertical market" term. This woman, Rose we'll call her, walks faster than you could ever imagine a five-feet-tall woman being capable of. She called it her "FedEx walk". Sometimes, she said, she'd be shopping with her kids or what have you, inadvertently slip into her "FedEx walk", and soon after discover her kids about 100 yards behind her, feverishly trying to catch up to mommy. On that day, Chad was feverishly trying to keep up with Rose.

The first thing you notice when you work for FedEx--they are very serious about this time thing. Our schedules were computer generated based on volume projections and various data that is recorded each day. So, one week's start times for Monday through Friday might look something like this: 6:44, 6:24, 6:20, 6:23, 6:20. Seriously. You are paid from that time, even if you punch in a couple minutes early. You have four minutes to do your a pre-trip (if I remember correctly, it was six minutes when I started the job but not long after reduced to four minutes--time is money, yeah?). At the end of the four minutes, somebody with a really loud voice yells, "Stretch n Flex," and we all report to an area and stretch, and flex. Almost all did so, and if not enthusiastically did so with good intentions. You need to, for you are about to lift more shit and bounce in and out of a truck more times in that one day than most people do in their entire lives, lucky for them. Stretch n Flex was five minutes, then you go to your truck--better get there fast, for the belt starts about 60 seconds later. The sort starts, and there is no other way to put it: The sort sucks. It is fast, strenuous, stressful, painful, your coffee gets cold before you can drink it, and the whole thing makes you wonder what the hell you are doing, this job! The speed of the conveyor belt is determined by industrial engineers based on belt length, average volume, and the upper limit of how much humans can be bled to pull crap--your crap, people--off the belt, put it in the truck, and get back to the belt. As a rule, you don't want to let something of yours pass you by. That stuff goes on the re-run cart, which goes back to the top of the belt, and yeah, people yell if there are too many re-runs.

The trickiest part of all this is not so much identifying, by address, your stuff while it moves by you on the belt (though that's really hard when you're new and haven't memorized all the addresses on your route), but getting it into your truck in the exact right place, some sort of order you and only you understand so you can grab it at its destination in an efficient manner. If you mess this up, you will forget about the misplaced package, it won't get where it needs to be on time, and you will have a "late". Lates are bad, very bad.

Done with training, it was time to report to duty. No doubt, I was nervous as hell. Clearly, in many, many ways it is not an easy job, particularly for newbies. I had to learn the procedures, drive a big truck in a brand-new city to me, learn how to meet what seemed like a crazy deadline, all starting at the ripe ol' hour of 6am-ish in the morning. I didn't know what to think. How would you like to be plunked into, say, Cleveland, given a big truck full of crap, and be told, "Deliver all this to the right place within two hours." Yeah, that's what I thought you'd think. . . .