I owe hearing loss to the Brockton UPS warehouse. My family has started imitating me by yelling “what!?” in a shrill voice every time I say something they can’t hear. I sometimes have to ask my girlfriend to repeat what she just said over six times before I can even make out what she is saying, even when she is six inches from my face.
Also, for the first time in my life I can no longer hear dog whistles. At the youthful age of twenty-two, I have the hearing problems of a sixty-five-year-old war veteran. All thanks to the Brockton UPS Warehouse. More specifically the screeching conveyor belts that ran through the building like that one scene from The Polar Express when they fell down that tube and ended up in Santa’s sleigh. UPS Warehouses are just like that except, get rid of all the joyful aspects and replace them with dust, dirt, and images of late stage capitalistic hellscapes.
I started this job around the middle of July. The pandemic was rampant, and I was losing money and my mind from being inside for so long. I threw my application at the wall of twenty or so jobs, and UPS stuck first.
When I first started there, the HR person that hired me offered me either the 6pm to midnight shift or 1 am to 6am shift. I went with the former as the latter seemed a little too neurotic. When I was thrown in the back of my first truck, I was met with the hunched neck and sagging pants of DJ. Dj was a local guy, around his mid-thirties. This was not his only job, as for most of the guys here as well. His smile showed a few missing molars and bright personality that knew how to make you laugh.
For the next two or so months I spent my nights on Yellow belt loading trucks to Providence. Most of the time it would be me and DJ in the back of the truck together. We’d take frequent smoke breaks, slip the occasional nip of liquor, and swap stories about what led to us being in the back of those trucks every night. I’d complain about online school and living at home with my parents. He’d tell me about the parking lot he had to park his truck in while he slept in it for the third week in a row.
After two months of loading the back of trucks high with boxes, I got news that I would not be returning to campus in the fall. Funny enough, that same week a supervisor walked out in the middle of a shift. In the moment I saw it as fate. I would be able to make more money as a supervisor. Maybe I would have to stay longer than I thought I was going to, but the work would be less intensive. I ended up taking the job when it was offered to me. It came with a nice pay raise, less laboring work, and in small, tiny print it claimed a piece of my soul.
Being a supervisor required less interaction with people on a regular basis. If I were talking to someone it usually meant that something was going wrong. If all was going well then, I was up on the catwalks watching the conveyor belts move packages down the shoots. It made the job a lot lonelier. Which at the time I would have said I preferred, but the truth was that this job was just about all the human interaction I was getting at the time. Now all I had to listen to was the sound of the conveyor belts.
God, those conveyor belts. No amount of loud music blasting in your headphones was ever enough to drown out the groaning from the gears. About six time a night an unloader would stack too many boxes on the belt causing a jam. Jams were perpetual, once it happened it would be an all-night event.
The worst part of it was how it would make the conveyor belt scream. All the weight would build up until a high pitch screech would echo around the warehouse, as if the conveyor belt were crying in pain. As we moved into the peak season right before Christmas, these jams happened constantly. As a supervisor I would have to jump onto the conveyor belt and break the jam. I would claw at them, pry them with my fingers, lay my shoulder into the side of them, and my favorite method, kicking them. Usually, a well-placed kick would get the boxes flowing. There was nothing more satisfying in my life at that point than kicking a box once and watching hundreds follow it down the cardboard river.
When I look back and try to remember pieces of this job, I struggle. It was only two years ago I worked there yet I can only remember the name of one coworker. On the night I left I cried before I reached my car. I would never have to hear the moans of the conveyor belt again. I could leave before my hearing went completely, or before my back began arching to an unfixable bend.
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