What can Brown do for you? Insubordination

Well everything is going pretty well on Pen 6. My employees are doing a great job of pulling missorts and going down on time. After a few months, I started to get upset that the number of missorts were starting to go up. I told Tom that he couldn't blame us for the belts turning off because we turned them off in emergency situations only.

Lou was on his way out. He was probably viewed as some sort of Pre-Load god since he took one of the worst buildings (except the carwash) and turned it into a pretty successful building. So there was some time from Lou's last day until our new building manager's first day. During that time, Tom was in charge of the building.

Now every Wednesday morning we had a pre-sort meeting. Usually it was about things coming up in the coming weeks. Or some information about volume. But since Lou left it turned into a bitch session. Load side complained about the sort going down late and missorts. The unload/sort team complained about the belts turning off and the number of packages sent back the return belts. It was some of my favorite memories.

This one week, Randy (Corona center's full time supervisor) was running the meeting. He started to talk about missorts and how to fix the problem. Now, Robert C. (my old unload partner) was out in Airport center working on Pen 7. So Randy was talking and Robert said that it was bull because the sort guys in the back didn't care about load side and left right away and never stayed to see the damage caused by missorts. This was true, I mean if anyone knew how the unload/sort was run it was me and Rob since we were both back there for an extended amount of time.

Randy tells us he doesn't want this to turn into a bitch session and if we wanted to leave we could. So Rob gets up and walks out. I wanted to leave too, but I decided to stick around. About 3-5 minutes later the crap started getting to high for me and I told them "I'm sorry I can't sit in hear and listen to this." So I get up and leave too. Maybe not the best course of action, but we were told we could leave.

So I head back to the Airport office and Rob is talking to Shon when I walk in. Shon looks up and gives this look like "oh sh!t". He tells us he is going to get in trouble for having his two supervisors walk out on the meeting. Rob and I tell him that Randy said we could leave if we wanted too. Shon said ok.

I head back to the main building to get my radio for the day. As I open the door, Tom steps out. He is blocking the door. He asks where I am going and I tell him. He says I can't get a radio today because I don't deserve one because of what I said about his supervisors in the morning meeting. I laugh a little and tell him that it was Rob that said it. He then asks for my id badge. Now this was a running gag at UPS. If someone asked for your badge, it meant they want to fire you and escort you out of the building. I told him I didn't have it on me, which I didn't it was in my briefcase in the Airport office. He told me that he was going to fire me and Rob for insubordination.

So all through the sort I am thinking I am going to be fired. If Lou was still around I probably would have been. Tom was fired up. He didn't like Rob at all, so if he could take down Rob I don't think he would care about taking me down too.

At break, Shon was talking to Tom and tried to get him to calm down. Shon later told us he couldn't do anything to talk him out of it. Rob and I were both mad because Tom wasn't even in the meeting, so how could he know anything. Shon told us to go talk to Randy.

So after the sort, we went and found Randy. Randy was like, "it wasn't a big deal. I told you guys to leave if you wanted to." He told us he was a little mad that we didn't stick around to hear what everyone had to say. He also threw in the fact that Tom couldn't do anything to us because he wasn't there.

So that was the end of it. Tom eventually forgot about it. And we went back to normal. That was the nice/bad thing about UPS...short term memory. We were always on survival mode, day to day was all that we cared about.

Next up, one more hilarious story about life without a building manager.