The Post-Graduate Weekend

Saturday is my least favorite day of the week. This is mainly due to my intense bitterness that I have to wake up at 6:30 am and drive to work in the dark while the rest of the world remains cozied up in their beds, the day a blank slate of opportunity stretching lazily before them. I imagine them sleeping in late, eating breakfast in their pajamas, and enjoying steaming mugs of tea while I drive an over-sized van frantically around downtown Grand Rapids, dropping off human tissue samples and getting lost in labyrinth-like apartment buildings.

Ok, so I'm not the only person who works on Saturdays, but sometimes it feels that way, and such an early start time certainly cuts short plans for late Friday night shenanigans. Not that I often have such plans, but if I did it would be nice to be able to execute them.

Saturdays at FedEx are rough for another reason, though, besides just missing out on lazy weekend mornings at home. The routine and routes for Saturday deliveries are totally different, so instead of heading out to the suburban Walker where I normally go, I've been assigned the downtown area. I don't claim to understand why the managers gave me—one of the newest employees—this route. Maybe they thought that it would be easier because the stops are closer together. Or maybe they figured I sort of already knew the area because it borders on Walker. Or maybe they just didn't care one way or the other. Whatever the rational, I don't like it.

First of all, there are too many little streets too close together for any of my maps to be entirely reliable or helpful. I can't tell you the number of times I've squinted at my map and matched a street to the wrong tiny-print name. Or how many times I've confidently chosen a route to my next stop only to discover that it involves turning the wrong way down a one-way street. Delivering downtown also means delivering to a number of hospitals and tall apartment buildings. The hospitals aren't so bad, provided someone thought to tell you which of the ten doors to go in so that you don't have to drive around the block five times looking for one that says “receiving”, only to discover that the loading dock is closed on the weekends and the man in the mailroom (when you finally finding it after wandering through the cafeteria) is grumpy because he once signed for a package that got lost and then was blamed for it. The apartment buildings on the other hand: those I hate. Every building seems to have a different rule about what to do with packages. Do I give to security? Do I leave it by the PO box and pray the neighbors don't have sticky fingers? Do I wait for someone to buzz me in so I can wander the halls looking for #401? Because of course, no one is ever home to actually sign for the thing.

And then there is that one stop that always has about 28 boxes which need to be delivered to the third floor of an office building. I'm just glad the building is mostly empty so there is no one there to see me struggling to keep the boxes from falling off my hand-cart as I attempt to hold the door open with one hand and push the cart through with the other.

On top of all this, remember that I am driving a truck. And I am still not comfortable with it, even when the back-up camera is actually working.

Ok, but I'm done complaining now, at least about that. I'm sure I'll get used to my new route eventually. The real reason I started writing this blog entry was to complain about something else, something related to why today was a particularly annoying Saturday. My thesis: Corporations are soul-sucking, impersonal, and I wish I could be self-employed my entire life. Perhaps I'm being a bit dramatic, but I really don't think humans were meant to work for a disembodied corporate power.

Don't get me wrong, FedEx is a very nice place to work, all things considered, and I'm grateful to be employed and earning a paycheck. But it's also a very big company, with rules and procedures created by people in offices hundreds or thousands of miles away. At FedEx, the most important thing about me is my employee number—which I use far more frequently than my name. Several times a month, we have to sign off on papers from “corporate” stating that we have read and agree with various procedures. We are exhorted to avoid late deliveries, not for the obvious reason that we want to please our customers, but boost our station's numbers, to avoid getting on the corporate bad list. Everything seems to be about appeasing this mysterious and omniscient “corporate” power. Screw up just a little bit on the mandated regulations and risk getting fired. Or worse, get your boss or your boss's boss fired, which I've heard legitimately happens.

It was the same at Barnes and Noble, although as the lowest of the staffing low, I was threatened less often with corporate power as with managerial power. “I really can't have you just standing there chatting with each other,” a head cashier snapped at me and a coworker once, after we took advantage of the first break in the line of the day to have a thirty-second conversation. “The manger is up in her office, and if she's sees you on the camera, she's going to send you home.”

I was struck by how often the rationale for doing something a certain way was because “corporate regulated it” or “the boss will see you” or “it's procedure.” Granted, I'm sure at one point all these things had great reasons behind them, but the original reasons are never what is emphasized. When a couple of my friends stopped by to say hi to me on their way through the mall, I wasn't told to keep the greeting short because it looks unprofessional or because it distracts me from my job. I was instead reminded that I was on camera and a manger could be watching me. Nothing like a little threat from Big Brother.

This afternoon after I finished all my deliveries and returned to the station, I was beckoned into the office by my FedEx manager because, apparently, I have fallen below satisfactory level in terms of my punctuality. What this means is that I am sitting on a 95.7% timeliness rating when the appropriate level should be above 96%. Because I haven't worked at FedEx for very long, if I am ever late for work I run the risk of totally screwing my percentage. In the past three+ months, I have only been late twice. Once was because I was asked to come in an hour early and wasn't totally sure what my punch-in time should be, so I was two minutes late. The other time was more legitimate—I didn't hear my alarm and over-slept, but still managed to get to the station in time to punch in only one minute late. One minute. That means that my cumulative tardiness is a total of three minutes. And yet this afternoon I had to sign into my FedEx account and click on this little box that says I understand I have been warned about my failure to be punctual while my manager looked over my shoulder eating his pizza.

“Wow. All this for a couple of minutes,” I said.

“A late is a late,” he replied without sympathy.

Perhaps I'm just sore because I was embarrassed by my little lecture. Even though I think the whole thing is ridiculous, I still want to remain on my boss's good side. But everything about it rubs me the wrong way. Checking off the little box, being told an exact and seemingly arbitrary percentage—it was all so impersonal and demeaning.

I'm sure this is the kind of thing that happens at every big business that has a lot of employees to keep track of. Standard procedures are set in place in order to protect workers and customers and profit, but sometimes—because no person or situation is totally alike—the procedures are inadequate and more harmful than helpful. Maybe it's necessary, but I think it's also dehumanizing.

More and more, I'm starting to idealize how wonderful it would be to work for myself, be my own boss. Set my own schedule. This probably isn't a good sign, given how comparatively little experience I've actually had in the workforce and how many years I probably have ahead of me. I'm probably just too used to being able to call my own shots, as I was for my four years of college. Still, I don't think I'm ever going to get comfortable with the whole concept of a punch-in clock or mass-produced employee handbook.