[Amps] A Crying Shame

[Michael Tope]

I dunno about FEDEX, but I had a room mate in college
who worked part time unloading trucks for UPS. At that
time (and I assume it's still the case) they were under
tremendous pressure to maintain a very high unloading
"rate" (boxes/hour) at the hub where he worked. Even
in the dead of winter he would come home from work
soaked from head to foot in his own sweat.

At the rate they were going (probably in the many
hundreds of packages/hour), I can't imagine that they
had time to read warning labels. I think they only thing
they looked for were red and blue label boxes which
got special treatment in terms of being taken to the
"head of the line" for sake of processing speed, but
not necessarily more careful physical handling.
Otherwise, I think they just grabbed stuff and threw it
onto the conveyor belt as fast as they could go
(no other way to make quota).

The best thing to do is to pack everything under
the assumption that at the very least, someone is
going to pick it up and throw it 3 or 4 feet onto a
conveyor belt with some random orientation
relative to the "this side up" label.

73 de Mike, W4EF...............

----- Original Message -----
From: <n4gi at tampabay.rr.com>
To: <amps at contesting.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 6:53 AM
Subject: Re: [Amps] A Crying Shame


>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: ka1xo at juno.com
>
> > Twelve "Fragile" stickers. Arrows. Big
> > letters: "Do Not Drop: Glass."
>
>
> Note that a bored min. wage box handler has ZERO reason to treat a
"fragile" package any different than a "non-fragile" one.  Marking your
delicate ham goodies is naïve and only an invitation to the chimp to keep
himself entertained....
>
> I received a linear amplifier via UPS last year.  The shipper of the unit
was nice enough to mark "this side up" on the top....  After a good chuckle,
I opened the box, got out my tools and started re-assembling the mess.  I'm
still finding disconnected things inside the sucker several months later.
>
> 73,
> Blake N4GI