Chris Moody’s Blog

Absent Memories

Just finished reading the book Absent Memories: Moving forward when you can’t look back. A fascinating first hand account of a 47 year-old women who lost all of her memories, and the 9 years since. A college graduate, a black belt, and former member of the National Guard, Beki Propst struggles to re-learn the most basic rules of social interaction, much less the skills to keep a steady job. Her view of life through new eyes sheds light on the things we take for granted.

The author loses all of her “declarative memory”.  After her loss, she still remembers how to do many of the ingrained daily rituals, like driving a car, but she couldn’t describe the rules of the road.  As she describes it in the book, “A computer geek might have said that I’d lost lost some data from my hard drive, but my operating system was apparently unaffected.”

Checking in at 117 pages, this book is a quick read, but well worth it.  You find it at Amazon.com here (or I’m sure anywhere else books are sold or borrowed).

Just found this on YouTube. I was laughing through the whole thing!

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It’s a Saturday morning as I sit in my kitchen, piddling away on my laptop. I’m about halfway through the Christmas rush at work. While it hasn’t been too terrible yet, we have had a couple days of interesting weather.

Back in July you’ll remember St. Louis got hit with big storms that brought down trees, which in turn brought down power lines. Well, this time it was ice that brought down the trees, which brought down the power (my house is fine). And while the mayors, and other various politicians make their sound bites about investigating Ameren for not trimming enough trees, we delivery folk are discovering something fascinating. Apparently people without power, don’t order things online.

Now this would tend to make a person think that life would be easier. Less volume equals less work, right? What kind of fantasy land do you live in? In my world, less than expected volume equals more work. It goes like this.

“Hey we’re not getting as much as we thought we would.”
“Really? Okay, take out a route and split that work inefficiently between the other drivers.”

Yeah, suddenly I’m covering more area. Drivers are criss-crossing each other (some passing up 6 other routes to get to their new work). And even if I finish up at a semi-decent time, I’m helping other drivers in worse shape than me. Never mind the fact that we’re all probably using more gas and spending more time finding each other to help out and using more money than might have been saved by eliminating the route in the first place. I think my bosses only ever look at one set of reports at a time.

“Hey! We ran 5 less routes yesterday! Way to go! What? No I don’t want to see the overtime, fuel, and employee moral reports, are you crazy!!”

I’d always heard rumors of this at work, but I never knew how much of an issue this was. Read the following story from AP that tells about how much UPS pays New York City in parking fines. My favorite line is the quote from the driver at the end.

NEW YORK (AP) — On a narrow street in lower Manhattan, delivery driver Godvell Merilus pulls his UPS truck alongside a curb and parks illegally. He doesn’t have a choice: There are no legal spaces, and Merilus has a schedule to keep.

The inevitable result comes wrapped in a blaze-orange envelope. Merilus gets a $115 parking ticket, one of four he receives this day.

“It’s automatic,” he said. “There is not a single day I don’t get a summons.”

Commercial delivery companies such as UPS, FedEx and others pay a steep price for doing business in New York City, getting an average of 7,000 parking tickets every day and paying more than $102 million in fines.

The parking violations turned into such a bureaucratic nightmare that the city created a program to reduce or dismiss the tickets in exchange for companies waiving their right to contest them. The program has eliminated 770,000 ticket hearings and saved $1 million in administrative costs per year since it began two years ago.

The companies are also saving cash, although their annual New York City parking tab is still high because some tickets are not covered under the program.

“It would be better if they didn’t give parking tickets, but I guess that’s unreasonable,” Jonathan Afromsky, vice president of Knickerbocker Meats Inc. in the Bronx.

UPS has a fleet of 1,000 trucks and receives about 15,000 tickets a month here. The company is the biggest offender in the city, paying $18.7 million in parking violations for the fiscal year that ended June 30, according to city data. FedEx was second with $8.2 million.

“We receive by far more parking fines in New York City than anywhere else in the world,” UPS spokeswoman Diane Hatcher said. “Simply stated, we don’t have the same level of difficulty with finding available parking spaces or loading zones anywhere else.”

The city issues about 10 million parking tickets a year. The program took shape after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when department heads were asked to make tough budget cuts.

In the finance department, Commissioner Martha Stark realized that many contested tickets issued to commercial trucks were dismissible as long as drivers were engaged in “expeditious delivery,” meaning 30 minutes or less.

The problem: To get the violations tossed, the companies had to either send an employee or hire a ticket broker to argue their case in front of an administrative law judge, a headache that created a backlog of tickets, bogged down the courts and cost the city a small fortune.

Stark said 200 administrative law judges spent half their time hearing commercial parking cases that otherwise would be tossed out under the expeditious delivery rule. Violations were also taking up to a year in some cases to settle. Tickets on average now take anywhere from a month or two to get resolved.

“It struck us as a huge waste of time for the companies … and for our staff,” Stark said. “It was just unacceptable.”

Under the program, the type of violation determines the ticket’s outcome. For example, double-parking violations in some areas can be erased completely for commercial vehicles. Violations for blocking a crosswalk or a bike lane can only be reduced by about 15 percent. Fines for blocking a driveway can be knocked down by 75 percent.

To date, 312 companies have enrolled in the program, including UPS, FedEx, Verizon, Coca-Cola and Time Warner Cable, which are the city’s biggest commercial offenders. Stark told the City Council that Verizon had saved $750,000.

“It is saving us time, and time is money,” said Joseph Troiano, president and owner of Bronx Butter & Eggs Inc., which previously wasted about 15 hours a month fighting tickets given to its six delivery vans. The program has reduced his parking fines by about $5,000 a year.

Still, there are critics.

Lynn Landsberger, marketing director of parkingticket.com, which helps people get out of tickets, said the city’s efforts were “smoke and mirrors.” She said the city is writing more tickets for violations that the delivery companies can’t get dismissed.

Stark rejected those claims. Ticket revenue is a mere 3 percent of the $18.5 billion the finance department collects each a year.

When officers start writing tickets for his UPS van, the affable Merilus tries to persuade them otherwise. If his company wasn’t getting reams of tickets every day, he said, “maybe I’d get a bonus instead of a turkey.”

It’s over!!! It’s over!!! Peak season at work is finally over and I finally have my life back! As I write this, I should be in packing and getting ready to get up at what my parents like to call “oh-dark-thirty”, and what I like to call “the butt-crack of dawn”. Instead I’m procrastinating and just enjoying the fact that I’m not working.

I’m thrilled to be able to visit family for the holidays. Working so hard during the rush up to Christmas makes me grumpy, tired, and sarcastic, but now that it’s here and I know that I’m going to be with family, I’m happy. Especially with everything that’s going on with them lately. In case any of them are actually reading this, I love you guys very much, and I can’t wait to see everyone!

Merry Christmas to everyone that may be reading this! Mom, Dad, Laura, John, Morgan, Katherine, Jessica (even if you can’t read yet). To GG & GG Pop, Katie & John and their little Ewok, Kurt & Monica, and Nicci. And even to all those of you who who have drifted away over the years but have clicked by to see what’s going on in my life… Merry Christmas.

(Can ya tell I’m in a good mood?)

-Christopher

I work for UPS. Most people who are here already know that. This is the company that sponsers #88 NASCAR driver, Dale Jarrett. They are also the ones that made those funny commercials with him, “We want you to race the truck.” Well folks, I’m here to tell you what Brown has done for you lately. In the newsletter that UPS mails me every month, they write that they’ve put an easter egg in a video game. Go rent or buy NASCAR 06: TOTAL TEAM CONTROL from EA Sports(tm) and you can “race the truck!”

All you have to do is enter the first name “Race” and the last name “The Truck” in the driver profile page to unlock this product placement, I’m sure bought and paid for, easter egg. Pretty cool though. I just wish it were the one with flames painted on the front like we have at our hub.

Well, I’m almost halfway through my first peak-season as a package car driver. I have to say it’s not quite as bad as I thought… yet. Even though my stop-count is going up, my route is actually getting smaller as they put more of it onto a “split-car”. That’s pretty nice. I can run a lot faster when everything is packed together, and a lot of times I’m still finished with deliveries before my pick-ups. Of course if that’s the case, I’ll help another driver finish up. Either way, I’m getting home late and aching in the evenings.

At least most of my Christmas shopping is done. It feels really good to not have to worry about that on the weekends. I can save them for more important things… like trying not move any part of my body, taking naps, sleeping in, and wishing I had a remote control that would get me the remote control.

Woo hoo! I got pulled off this week’s route, today, to be trained on a new one in Maryland Heights. This usually wouldn’t be cause for celebration… in fact quite the opposite, since it means learning a whole new area. But as it turns out, they were showing me this route because it’s open and needs a new driver. And that driver will probably be me.

It’s a highly residential area which means no waiting for signatures, but it also means not too many bathrooms and water coolers to borrow. The pickups are many and some are pretty heavy, too, but they’re all ready before 5:00. So there’s definite potential for it being a good route!

The only drawback is that it’s a training route. In other words, some new-hire drivers will do their 30-day probationary period on my route, and I’ll do vacation coverage in the mean time. Not too bad though, considering that I was an X-man for less than 6 months!

Okay, so I fulfilled my promise in my last entry to find some better blogging software, and here it is! It’s very simple. It uses PHP which I know, so I can tweak it if I want. It doesn’t use a database, so it won’t tie up resources. And it even has an RSS feed!!! That means you newsreaders can subscribe to my webpage. And if anyone does, I’ll be shocked!

Life’s been pretty normal. I just finished a 3 week stint on a pretty heavy route at UPS. The first week was hell… but I wound up with 13 hours of overtime, so that was awesome. After that, I figured out the secret and brought it down to about 6 hours. Next week I’m on the route right next to it. Oh! And my raise kicks in too!

I went to Outback for dinner tonight. Monica, Kurt’s girlfriend, took us as a thank you for me loaning her my oldest computer (a 300MHz PII running Win98SE). I think I got the better end of the deal considering the thing has been idle for at least a year and a half. The food was good, and for once they didn’t give me a steak that was still bleeding.

Have a look around the photo gallery if you haven’t recently. I changed it the other day so that it’s not just the same old pictures. You can look at my most recent vacation photos or whatnot (if you’re logged in, which, if you’re reading this, then you must be). I’ll probably have to rotate them out as I get new ones though since I’m running low on disk space.

That’s it for now! Until next time!

Okay, so I haven’t updated this thing in forever. I need to create an easier way for me to submit stuff to this page that doesn’t involve editing HTML. But you don’t care about that, you just want to know what I’ve been up to for the past 4 months.

Well, I made it in package car. I’m a full fledged X-man in the North County center. No that doesn’t mean I’m a mutant. It means I don’t have my own route. I just fill in on other people’s routes when they’re on vacation. I think I know about 7 routes right now ranging from the insanely overwhelming, which I was on last week, to the very simple, which I’m longing for now. I’ll probably be an X-man for a little while…learn a few more areas…and then start bidding on routes as they come up.

Elsewhere in my life (not that I have time for anything else), I’ve pretty much been up to the same old thing. I was able to work out my vacation schedule for the year. I’ve already been to Colorado for one vacation. My second week, which ended on the 4th of July, I stayed home. Aside from hanging out with friends on the holiday (Hi Katie!), I took a little hiking trip into Castlewood State Park with my camera in search of the West Nile Virus. No wait…in search of cool outdoorsy pictures. And I got some… West Nile, that is. No, I mean pictures! I’ll post a new gallery under the Pics menu soon, so you can see. Btw, the rabbit in those pics was fearless. I got to feed him part of my sandwich.