We were given a choice whether or not those of us who were having a milestone service year wanted to speak on Founders Day in our department meeting. Since the one consistent feedback I have gotten during my entire 25-year career at UPS was that I don’t speak up enough in meetings, I thought I would make up for the whole thing here today.
No one intends to have a long career at UPS. You come to work at UPS as a temporary thing while you are planning your life. Those plans do not include UPS. We come for the benefits, the tuition assistance, the non-standard hours that don’t interfere with classes or our other real jobs. Parents don’t envision their kids growing up and working for UPS. I think these are just the basic realities of life.
I worked the majority of my career in Information Services Learning & Development or Corp HR Learning & Development. I would have never lasted 25 years had I been in Operations. I know exactly how long I would have lasted in Operations had I worked in Operations: four months. I know because I worked twice for UPS. The first time I worked in the Meadowlands Hub, and I lasted four months. Two weeks as an unloader, and 3 ½ months as a jambreaker. I am not making the jambreaker thing up. It is a real job where you stand on a catwalk and wait for a belt to jam, then go down and turn off the belt, unjam it, and start it up again. It was easy but quite boring. So I quit again. I never put the jambreaker job on my resume because it takes too long to explain what a jambreaker is.
At one time I was told UPS had a policy that if you worked for UPS and left, they wouldn’t rehire you. That must have been a big problem, because nearly everyone in our country has worked for UPS. We have to let people come back. UPS hired me again in 1997.
When I came back, I worked full-time in Information Services Learning & Development. We were hiring lots of people in our group because all of our computer programs were being re-done and needed training because of Y2K. Since the programmers of the all of those aging mainframe programs either forgot or were too lazy to put the first two digits of the year in the date field, we thought when it switched to the year 2000 with just a 00 in the date field, everything would stop working and planes would fall out of the sky and the lights would go out. We must have done a real good job because nothing happened like that.
At that time, UPS was still kind of my second job. I was a pastor of a small church here in New Jersey when I started and a woman in our church worked in the UPS I.S. L&D department. She took care of the church’s finances so she knew I really needed to get an additional job since I was being paid a very low salary. Since we had come from the Midwest, we were naïve and it took us a while to realize we weren’t making very much money. So I came back to UPS while I was a pastor--again, just like the first time. At first, my boss called me “Rev” and in our meetings people would apologize to me for cursing. So it was a little awkward at first, but as time went on I settled in and people started calling me by my first name like our policy says, and cursing right in front of me.
In I.S. (or Information Technology, IT), the people are mostly computer programmers, so they are pretty smart but often socially awkward. I fit in pretty well in that environment, and my social skills were right in line with the environment I was in. (As you can imagine, my being an introvert was not a good fit for a pastor, and I still to this day usually have a family member call in the Chinese takeout order because I'm shy that way.) I was an instructional designer at first, and then I switched to being mainly a facilitator for the next three years. I am proud that I got certified to teach business writing with Franklin Covey during that time, and I saved the company thousands of dollars for three straight years that we didn’t have to hire a vendor to teach business writing.
In 2005, the department was downsized and I transitioned to become an I.T. business analyst. I was in that role in about four different groups over nine years, all moves that were made for me without my input. I was not as good of a fit in those roles, but by then we were a family of five at home--I like to call our family Five for Fighting--so I kept showing up to work and doing what I had to do to make a living. I applied for seven UPS jobs during those years and did not get any of them.
In 2014, I happened to see an L&D job in Corporate that looked like something that would be a good fit for me. So I poked around and found out that it didn’t require a relocation. For whatever reason, I love high taxes and paying tolls everywhere I go and don’t want to move from New Jersey. So Corp HR L&D hired me and I worked in that role for almost five years. I supported the driver training expansion from two to 10 sites, the transition from Success Factors to the Cornerstone Learning Management System, and many other things I can’t think of right now. Since that time I have felt like I was where I was supposed to be, and I even got promoted to manager in my 22nd year with the company.
As time has gone by, I have grown to appreciate this community-minded, diverse, generous, hard-working company that has helped so many of us make a good living, that has given my daughter a Casey scholarship, and has given me skills and knowledge that I have used in life both in and out of UPS.
I have now been here long enough to start thinking about what may be next for me. I feel like I am still contributing at a pretty high level, and I hope to go out like Tom Brady did when he retired after the 2021 season when they won the Super Bowl. Wait, he’s still playing isn’t he? It’s hard to know when to retire. But in the end, these companies are dynamic, ever-changing entities facing new business realities that may not allow us to decide for ourselves. So I did not set out to be at UPS for 25 years, but somehow it happened. And I’m grateful it did.
The speech ended with the previous paragraph. I had intended to include the poem below, but there were about 15 other people who would also be speaking in the one hour meeting, so I cut my speech down to about five minutes. But here in this blog post, I’d like to close with the poem as I think it really captures the placement of UPS Founders Day, which always occurs in late August, but also serves as a kind of metaphor for those of us who are in the twilight of our careers. It’s called “Sweet Summer Days” by Dennis Caraher.
I think it is a brilliant poem that has a refrain, “In these fading, sweet summer days.” I have always been sensitive to the passage of time, and even today as we are in the final days before the pool closes, the temperature is getting a little cooler, school is starting, and summer is almost over. It’s something I can feel, and it feels a bit like a loss to me. And when I think about my UPS career after 25 years of service, I know I am in the midst of “fading, sweet summer days.” My girls are adults now, another reminder that I am in the “fading, sweet summer days.” Soon the leaves will change, the air will chill, and we’ll be approaching winter. Until then, I will swim laps for the final few times this summer, sleep with the windows open at night to take in the cool air, and hold on to “these fading, sweet summer days” as long as I can.
Link to Fading Sweet Summer Days by Dennis Caraher