When you work at a typical UPS warehouse or HUB you'd quickly get the feeling that you are surrounded by old, worn, and beaten up equipment, machinery, tools, etc. This is a valid feeling, because you really are surrounded by all these things, but UPS also is a gateway to some of the newer and newest things in life.
When things are shipped throughout the nation via UPS to places such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CVS Pharmacy, Office Depot, etc etc. you end up handling a lot of things that are marked very explicitly to be opened at or after a certain date. We typically abide by these written requests, but when the volume gets really high "jams" happen. These lead to some packages breaking and then their contents are strewn everywhere. I remember at the end of April seeing tons and tons of Pokemon Emerald games because the Pokemon Emerald release was May 1st, 2005 and because those boxes would pop open so easily.
This package breakage happens so frequently that there are "tote boxes" throughout every work area which are used for storing both the cardboard remains of the package and its contents until you carry it to this station where people will repair or repackage any and all damaged boxes.
So, that is pretty cool, because I get to see all these really cool CDs, DVDs, video games, etc way before they come out. There are also really awesome computers, cell phones, etc etc that are shipped through UPS. No wonder they are so strict about security at the warehouse!
Another thing about UPS that is pretty "new" is their use of Bluetooth with our loading scanners. I get to/have to use these scanners every day to scan and load anywhere between 1100 and 1600 packages in 4.5 hours. The unit is acutally two units... a scanner and a base unit. They are connected wirelessly via Bluetooth. This is really cool, because it means I only have to have one little thing strapped to me all night instead of two things... one of which is about three to five pounds. It's also really cool because I now have an excellent feel for Bluetooth's effective range.
There are other cool "new" things at the UPS hub that I work at, but I think mentioning two is enough for one post.
Posted by David at May 27, 2005 12:19 AMYeah, the UPS facility in Gainesville is over 50 years old, but I'd see CDs and DVDs in open boxes long before they came out in stores, it was pretty neat. However, I think the strangest boxes I ever handled were human organs for organ transplants at Shands.
Posted by: Nate at May 31, 2005 03:16 PMLast night we shipped hundreds of boxes of Harry Potter books for the July 16th sale date. It actually messed up our operation pretty badly for the first few hours, because it added so many pieces to the night's load with nothing leaving.
This caused things to back up, and ultimately two boxes fell from a chute to the ground. So, at the end of the night I got to see what the newest edition of Harry Potter looked like.
It was kindof neat getting all the boxes though, because so many people would like to see the Harry Potter books ahead of time, and it made doing the math on how much I loaded really easy. I basically had to stack these things like you would on a pallet. So, I just had to multiply four times five times the height times the number of columns I made. Knowing that each box weighed 24lbs was neat too, because I knew I loaded up to 200 boxes which means I loaded over two tons of Harry Potter books. That is pretty wild to me.
Posted by: David at July 12, 2005 01:17 PM