If you know me, you know I like oddball jobs. I’ve never been one to feel content with some of the more traditional types of college employment such as fast-food or retail, and, as such, I have held a couple of interesting employment positions throughout the past few years. In high school, I worked at a lake as a paddleboard instructor:
The team
Last summer, I Cable Mapped: an extremely taxing and independent job that comprised land surveying and system design of fiber internet systems for Comcast. It sounds complex, which it was, but it was extremely fun. I got to live out of my car and not talk to anyone for weeks straight.
A typical mapping experience. Not joking.
Honestly, the entire cable mapping experience could be a post of its own. It was condensed chaos.
This summer, I continued the trend of outside, independent jobs by working as a delivery driver for Amazon. Way to stick it to the big corporations, right? My name is Keane Hauck and in this essay I will explain why offbeat jobs are ideal alongside why working for Amazon is really not as bad as it could have been please don’t hurt me I’m not a corporate shill
How it worked
Delivery driving is hard. Every day, we would be assigned a specific route to follow and a van which we would have to load ourselves. In the mornings, we would meet at an offsite location to prep the vans, and then drive in waves over to the warehouse for package loading. So, in intervals, a fleet of vans would drive up to the warehouse, all the drivers would hop out, and everyone would load their 200-odd packages into the van in the span of about 15 minutes. This is probably the most chaotic part of the day - each wave is on an extremely tight time requirement so that the following waves don’t fall behind on schedule. This results in a lot of drivers running around the warehouse with carts of packages like chickens with their heads cut off.
Packages are provided to us by the warehouse in 2 different forms: totes and overflow. Totes are big bags of 20-30 packages each, which are easy to load because they’re just one big thing to pick up. Overflow, on the other hand, are all the other miscellaneous packages that do not fit in totes (think: furniture, tools, etc.). The overflow are a nightmare to load - you are provided the order in which you will be delivering them, but they aren’t sorted for you at the warehouse. So, each morning, you have to frantically search through entire carts full of assorted packages to find the specific sequence of delivery numbers. If you don’t load them in order, you will waste large amounts of time on the road by having to sift through the entire van to find the right package. Remember, you gotta get all this done in 15 minutes.
Pictured on the right: totes. Pictured on the left: overflow.
The one saving grace of overflow packages is that they have a 50-pound limit, which is good, because I also have around a 50-pound limit.
After loadout, you’re on your way. You are also provided a phone with the Amazon app, which directs you to each stop sequentially. The app works fairly well overall, but the built-in GPS is ass. It frequently directs you through non-existent roads, points you to the wrong houses, and just flat-out stops working. Get used to pulling up Google Maps on your own phone, because you’re gonna need it.
An example route with stops numbered
Speaking of your own phone, you’re not allowed to use it. Kind of. The rules for delivery change based on the type of van you get.
About a quarter of the vans were non-branded vans (like Penske or Ryder), which were the desired ones. The branded Prime vans, on the other hand, all contained truckloads (pun intended) of metric-monitoring hardware: the worst offender of which is the Netradyne Driveri. The Netradyne Driveri is an AI-powered camera system that tracks your speed, following distance, stop sign compliance, phone usage, and many other metrics. If you are found to be in violation of any of these metrics (such as driving over the speed limit, not providing enough following distance, picking up any cellular device, etc.), you get a violation. 3 violations and you’re suspended.
The approximate distance you need to stop before a stop sign in order to not get a violation
As you can imagine, it’s incredibly preferable to get a non-branded van each day. Unfortunately, I only was lucky enough to get them a couple times. I think they prioritize giving them to the senior drivers.
And, to be honest, as Orwellian and draconian (those are the two biggest words I know) as the camera sounds, it’s really not that bad. You just have to be extra cautious to never speed and leave adequate following distance, as well as never look away from the windshield: if you look down for any reason, you get dinged for distracted driving (forget changing your playlist, too). The camera does put pressure on you constantly, but infractions aren’t that hard to avoid when you know what you’re doing. Regardless, you don’t want the Prime vans. When you don’t have a van with a camera, you can WHIP THAT BAD BIH - I be doing 65 in neighborhoods in those unmarked vans. Kidding. Or am I?
The lame stuff
Once you get settled into the daily rhythm, they’ll find a consistent route to give you. My route was in a small town called Newton, Kansas. About half of the intersections in Newton don’t have any form of traffic control (stop signs, lights, etc.) so you can imagine how it is to drive there. Newton also has an overabundance of train tracks, and it is incredibly common to be stuck for 10-15 minutes behind a particularly slow or long train.
Each route has an expected completion time assigned by the Great Amazon Algorithm. Each route is estimated to take 10 hours - if you spend too much time between your stops, you fall behind. If you fall behind, you get in trouble from Dispatch. This is one of the main things about the job that sucks: you aren’t as work-independent as you think you are. If it’s a busy route, you have to constantly be moving: if you stop, or take time at your own pace, you won’t finish in time. You’re forced to work at the pace that Amazon expects.
Slow routes can be tedious too. One critical job skill you’ll soon develop is the skill of estimating the pace you need to work at. They don’t block pay for the full 10 hour shift, so on slow days a large portion of the job consists of wasting time to get your full hours in. On slow days I would dump all of the packages in one big pile instead of sorting them so that it would take me longer to find each package for my stops. There’s always this weird push-and-pull of slow days being boring but busy days being frantic. It would be rare to have days nicely in the middle.
The worst part of the job, by far, is the lack of self-advocacy. The camera that tracks infractions is often wrong/unfair, and there’s no real way to stand up for yourself. If someone cuts you off on the highway, you get lit up for not leaving enough following distance, even though it was no fault of your own. If you think your road rage is bad currently, wait until shitty drivers make you get actively punished at your workplace.
One time, I got an infraction for failing to stop at a stop sign because I was distracted by honking at a bumper sticker that said “Honk if you have to POOP.” That one might have been a little more my fault.
The funny stuff
There’s just so much random and hilarious stuff that happens while you’re delivering. Sometimes, packages would be delivered in their original packaging, which was always fun to see.
One day I delivered 7 different bidets to various homes. I affectionately called it the Bidetpocalypse.
On my second-to-last day, the e-brake got stuck for one of the wheels on my van while I was in the warehouse. I couldn’t get it to move, so my supervisor hopped in the van and gunned it out of the warehouse, leaving a huge skidmark and demolishing a speedbump in the process.
If you’re curious, I did pee in water bottles. It’s a stereotype of delivery drivers for a reason.
Also, customers can leave delivery instructions for how they wish their packages to arrive, which are often ridiculous for so many reasons. Some are funny:
Some are nonsensical:
Some are sassy:
Some you’d never expect:
Some are messing with me:
Some don’t realize that their instructions apply to every order:
This was in July
And some just have funny names:
The most ridiculous thing that happened to me was the airstrip incident.
One day, I was supposed to deliver a package to a hanger at a local airfield, which I thought was super cool. I had never been to an airfield, and I was ogling all of the aircraft as I drove up. Approaching the hangar, the GPS system routed me across what looked like a runway: so I pulled up, looked both ways to ensure that no aircraft were coming, and drove across to get to the hanger.
As soon as I got to the other side, a helicopter swooped down at me and started hovering about 25 feet over my van. Wind was going everywhere, I couldn’t hear myself think, and I was horrified that the helicopter was crashing into me or something. So, I stopped. The helicopter landed, and this surly old man stormed over.
“You’re going to F$\%\@! JAIL! YOU’RE GOING TO F$%@! JAIL!”
Um, uh oh. As the helicopterist yelled at me, I saw a small sign in my review mirror: “$10,000 fine for any unauthorized vehicle on the airstrip.” Whoopsies.
As the guy was yelling, a pickup truck drove up and blocked my van off so I couldn’t move. Another guy got out and started discussing with the angry guy whether or not they should call the cops.
Eventually, they demanded that I give them my license or else they’d call the cops. I figured it’d be easier to just comply, so I gave them my license, they took a picture of it, and they moodily moved the pickup so I could leave.
Shaken up, I delivered the package and got ready to go, and in the process of trying to leave the airfield I accidentally drove onto the airstip again. SWOOSH - the helicopter was back, but I wasn’t stopping again. I hightailed it away, and for my next 5-or-so deliveries, I had a helicopter escort trying to intimidate me.
About 3 miles away from the airstrip. Get a life, buddy.
Nothing ever came of it, but man was it a good story back at the station.
The interesting stuff
The thing I most appreciated about delivery driving is the perspective on other people’s lives you gain.
When you deliver, you get to see the many different environments that people live in. You get to see inside people’s homes and garages, and see the sort of things they order. It’s definitely a sobering experience.
I delivered to people whose homes smelled like feces. I delivered to people whose porches had hundreds and hundreds of packages piled up. I delivered to people whose homes were mansions. I delivered to people who could barely speak English.
You also, sadly, realize how much of the population is senile. I frequently delivered to assisted living centers where, to leave, you’d have to enter the current month or year. One time, I had an older gentleman come out of his house to receive a package, and he had to struggle to remember how to write his own name.
When you get to see other people in their homes, the world gets a little bit bigger. It’s a job where you definitely get to expand your own perspective.
My verdict
So, would I recommend delivering for Amazon? Yes, for a short while. All in all, it kinda sucked. It was hot, dirty, and random. But, that’s exactly why I did it. Last summer, I worked a job that was hotter, dirtier, and randomer, and I would recommend that too.
I think everyone, in the course of their life, should try out some random job they never thought they’d experience. Every offbeat job you perform gives you a peek into some small world you never before knew existed. Prior to delivering, I had never really considered the experience of a delivery driver, but you better believe I’ll now be offering water bottles to them when I see them.
If I was giving advice to a friend, I’d say get out there, get some experience, and immerse yourself in a new world. And hey, maybe you’ll end up enjoying it.