D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
December
2008
UPS
Page: 2He takes a swig of Gatorade from one of the two bottles he's stashed on his dashboard, calculating that his route will have him in the vicinity of a Wendy's around lunchtime.
"We can take a half-hour or an hour for lunch," he explains. "This is a long day, let's face it. And if you take a half-hour for lunch, you're home a half-hour sooner, that's how I think."
From the Silver Schools warehouse, Vasquez heads up the street to Hometown Oxygen. He walks through the door with his dolly loaded with three large packages and is met by a handful of employees who greet him by name. As he unloads the boxes and someone signs for their receipt, all trade small talk and laughs.
Up the street at the Grant County Office Complex, Vasquez makes the rounds, delivering a handful of packages to numerous offices and departments. As one woman signs for her delivery, she asks, "Can you pick up?" Vasquez says yes, to which she replies, "Oh, you're a life-saver!"
He rolls his dolly down the hall to another office where a gentleman asks him if he can take a few pick-ups.
"It's got a pre-paid label so, yes, I can take it," Vasquez says. He turns his dolly around, flips it open to create a longer carrying area, then loads the three sizeable boxes onto it. Laughing that the dolly is like a "Transformer" robot — shifting shape and size to accommodate nearly any task or piece of freight — he says, "Yeah, it's darn handy. It's a great design."
He heads outside and loads this new load of pick-up packages on the shelf of his truck.
"Boy, I'm getting a lot of pick-ups today! I'm going back with my truck fuller than when I left!" he jokes.
He heads back up Silver Street to Armstrong Flooring, then to the small apartment complex across the street.
"We have so many residential customers now," Vasquez remarks. "They're getting household products, stuff they buy over the Internet. It does real good for us," he says of the increased delivery business for UPS. "A lot of people are running businesses out of their homes these days. Some of them seem to make a pretty good living that way, just buying and selling stuff that way, and we've seen a lot more delivery business out of it, too. It keeps me busy. No complaints — it keeps me employed!"
From here, Vasquez heads up the By-Pass Road to the Forest Service offices, then loops back to make a series of deliveries to businesses along Hwy. 180, then over to a residential area near the Real West Cinema. After a series of business and residential deliveries — and even more pick-ups — he finds himself in happy proximity to Wendy's in time for a well-deserved lunch break.
Fortified, he rolls back into action — or, rather, into molasses. Traffic on Hwy. 180, under construction for months now, is crawling. Vasquez says that he anticipated traffic difficulties and proactively called a number of the businesses at which he picks up packages every day.
"Quite a few of them said they don't have anything for me to pick up today, so I cut them off the list. We won't have to go there. That'll save a lot of time," he says brightly.
At one business, he makes a different sort of pick-up — homemade chocolate chip cookies and peppermint patties, gifts from the office staff.
"You see? I run like an animal all day on this job but I can't lose any weight because my customers are just too nice," he says with a big smile. "People give me great stuff to eat all the time!"
At Eagle Mail Services on Hwy. 180, he stops to pick up a handful of ground packages and one going airmail.
Business owner Lynne Schultz cautions Vasquez, "Watch that big one. It's heavy and it's in a wooden box. Do you have gloves? You'd better watch for splinters."
Vasquez maneuvers the crate — an automobile engine, Schultz explains — and is ready to head out when Schultz sees a young woman hurrying toward the store.
"If you can wait just one minute. I think she's got a one-day air," Schultz says.
"Sure thing," Vasquez says with a smile. "I'm running good today."
From here, he does a handful more business package pick-ups, a residential pick-up, and then heads to the UPS Store on Hwy. 180 to drop off packages shipping airmail for the next leg of their expedited journey.
And for the close of his business day, he heads up to the semi-remote mountain town of Pinos Altos.
"It's a really cool way to end my day," he says of this final loop. "They're all regular customers and they're really cool people. And after all my running around and fighting this traffic, it's nice to go up there and restore my peace and quiet.
"There's just a couple of businesses I go to up there and they're open until six," he says. "The rest of it, most of it, is residential. It's people getting stuff they ordered."
One of those residential customers runs a unique business out of his home, Vasquez says.
"He does some sort of a recording business, working with some pretty famous people," he says. "He sends out their CDs all the time, so I'm always going there. It's really neat that he can do that. He can stay home and run this interesting business out of his home because of delivery now, because of what I do." Vasquez smiles. "I think that's pretty neat."
Donna Clayton Lawder is senior editor of Desert Exposure. She has been known to rely on UPS to deliver holiday goodies to her family back east and to receive a package or two, herself, from Amazon.com