More about me

The UPS night shift

Baldwin, Wisconsin · October 2017 – December 2021

I supervised the night shift at UPS in Baldwin, Wisconsin — 5pm to 1am, 8 to 15 package handlers depending on the season. Every other manager and supervisor left the building before my shift started. I was the only member of management on site, running two sorts at once: the local sort for ground packages, and Last Look Air Recovery, which loads air cans that go directly onto an aircraft with no further inspection. The FAA, IATA and the TSA all audit that work. A missed package there was not a complaint, it was a federal finding.

The night was mostly other people's constraints. Parking 40 to 80 delivery trucks in a lineup for the next morning, each in a specific spot with inches of clearance, in a building too small for them. Loading 6 to 8 feeder trailers and telling the next facility how many to expect — a call I had to make on my own estimate, hours before they were loaded. Watching the clock on DOT hours for every driver, and handing a route to someone with time left rather than letting anyone run out of it. Customs documentation audited on international packages. Hazmat and leaking packages handled only by people authorized to touch them. Driver and handler timecards. Some nights I also ran the customer drop-off counter, tracked 30 to 50 personal-vehicle drivers through the holidays, made sure trucks were emptied as drivers came back, and locked up the warehouse at the end of it.

Safety was mine too: a prework communication meeting with a safety message every day, stretching before anyone touched a belt. I trained personal-vehicle drivers through two holiday seasons as their main supervisor and point of contact, and ran that fleet without an injury. No injury on my sort lines either, the whole time I was there.

The part that turned out to be the same job I do now was SALT testing — Service Awareness Label Testing. I would route a package that did not belong down a belt into a regulated area, or leave one where it was easy to miss, and see whether the process caught it. Running it required hazmat certification. A clean audit tells you the audit passed; it does not tell you the check is working. That is the same question I ask a green test suite, and I did not learn it from software.

All of that ran alongside school. An hour from home to campus, a half hour from campus to UPS, an hour home again. I finished the A.A.S. in Web Design and Software Development at Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College,Summa Cum Laude, while I was still on the sort line — and I was already building websites for pay by then, for First Presbyterian Church of Hinckley from June 2019 to August 2021. I left UPS in December 2021, moved to Florida for a remote IT internship at GreyCastle Security, and finished the B.S. in Information and Communication Technology at University of Wisconsin Stout, Magna Cum Laude, after that.

Earlier work

I was homeschooled K–12 and started working in my high school years. None of what follows is on my resume. It is most of what taught me how work actually gets done.

A metal recycling yard first. Then Morning Sun Farms, a microgreens greenhouse. Then Walmart as a cashier, then FMS Corps, a powdered carbon metal factory. I was a UPS driver helper over Christmas my senior year, which is how I first got in the building. Then landscaping at Lakeside Landscaping in Balsam Lake, Wisconsin. Then Dollar General, saving for college through a year off.

The UPS sort-line job started in October 2017. Two lawncare jobs overlapped it: PHM Inc for a short stretch, and Willow River Companies through the summer of 2021 — also brief. Add a few things that lasted a season or less: collecting maple syrup, and coaching track and field for third and fourth graders at Taylors Falls Elementary in Minnesota.

Three of those were landscaping and lawncare — Lakeside, PHM and Willow River. That is where the domain model inTurfOps comes from. I have run the equipment and done the work, in the weather, on someone else's schedule. It is a different thing from interviewing an operator about it.

The house

I bought a house recently and have been working through it since. The list so far:

Electrical

Ran the circuit for a 240-volt hot tub, then replaced its heater and control board. Not a project you get to be approximately right about.

Outside

A privacy fence 9 feet tall and 28 feet long, doubling as a morning glory trellis. A retaining wall 4 feet high and 40 feet long. Cement steps added to the front porch.

Inside

Extensions and crown moulding for the kitchen cabinets. Folding closet doors installed.

Growing things

Several gardens put in, and vegetables in them.

Photos of some of these to come. The fence and the retaining wall are the two worth looking at.

Outside work

Endurance

Running — four 5Ks, one of them a fundraiser for a K9 unit. Currently training for a half Ironman.

Outdoors and travel

Greece. Snorkelling in the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic and Grand Turk. Voyageurs, Glacier, and the Utah parks — the standing goal is all of them. Hiking, camping, fishing. PADI open-water certified.

Building things

DIY, gardening, landscaping. See the house.

Quieter

Reading, history, cooking.