6 ms·

You know these people, so do you have any insight as to why they did this? Is it envy? “Screw this guy getting his fancy TV that I don’t have.” If not, what?

• kakarot 8y ago
  Redirecting frustration over 20th-century working conditions, now doubt.
• andai 8y ago
  I work as a postman. People don't really send letters any more, so a large and increasing percentage is packages. Many (most?) of my coworkers hate their jobs, and their lives, and are deliberately rough with packages, especially if they look expensive.
  • mevile 8y ago
    "I'm unhappy with my life so I'm going to make other people unhappy too." How about these people do something with their incredibly valuable short lives other than being miserable? Unless you're in chronic pain of some kind, being alive is a gift. It's a treasure. Every moment is precious.
    • ohithereyou 8y ago
      I'd rather have my packages broken than my local carrier going postal. I can always get a replacement from the company if my package is busted up.
      • cm2012 8y ago
        Research shows that relieving aggression like that or yelling actually increases it over time.
        • Retric 8y ago
          That’s not nessisarily relevant. If you flip the fuck out 5 days in your life it’s not going to escalate much, but it might prevent a postal episode. That said if it’s a weekly habit that’s another story.
    • ninkendo 8y ago
      Yeah, and why don't depressed people just cheer up? Seriously it's not hard...
      • rutierut 8y ago
        I think we can all agree this is something completely different.
        • albedoa 8y ago
          Which element of each do you think is being compared?
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • nightfly 8y ago
      Because they are stuck doing a stressful job with probably low pay or poor hours to make ends meet?
    • thanksDr 8y ago
      Have you ever been hungry?
    • CalRobert 8y ago
      Because they have bills and changing jobs is hard.
  • Scoundreller 8y ago
    Iunno, delivering what amounts to be presents has gotta be more pleasant than bills.
• esotericn 8y ago
  I'd imagine it's some combination of: - terrible pay - long hours - silly computerised targets It's difficult to care about your job if your job doesn't care about you.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• mikeash 8y ago
  It’s easier to be rough than to be gentle, so if there are no consequences to being rough, that’s naturally how it’ll end up.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    In the parent comments, it seems like the package handlers are being deliberately rough, i.e. putting in extra work, to ruin these packages.
    • justinhensley 8y ago
      I did not intend it that way. They handle something on the order of thousands of packages per shift. They aren't putting in extra work to be rough with even most of them.
      • saagarjha 8y ago
        > Every one of them said that they (and all of their coworkers) handle all packages on a scale ranging from rough to purposefully damaging. One guy told me how he targets boxes marked Fragile for extra abuse when he's exhausted/angry/having a bad day. But it does look like at least some are worth the extra effort to damage?
  • chrsstrm 8y ago
    That's not always true. It might seem like it is easier to be careless, but if we're talking about any item over just a couple pounds in weight, you're going to hurt yourself being careless as opposed to being cautious. There is a monumental difference between throwing 20lb packages all day vs. picking them up and setting them down. Your body will tell you that it's just not sustainable in the long run if you want to live without persistent pain. You can very easily learn this by observing anyone who's done the job for more than a year or two - they might look like they're being lazy but they are really just trying not to hurt themselves. You might throw one or two in anger, but repeatedly throwing packages for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 48 weeks will make you regret it. There is nothing more painful and hopeless on the job than a mechanical injury you feel in every single box you move. You learn to do it without hurting yourself and this almost never involves being careless with the package. The consequences might not come from being reprimanded about broken items, but it will come in the form of injury and pain.
• denim_chicken 8y ago
  Go work as a package handler at UPS/Fedex/etc for a few weeks and then you'll understand.
  • mcv 8y ago
    Makes me wonder whether it might actually save money to pay those people better.
    • ianlevesque 8y ago
      Yes.
    • sokoloff 8y ago
      A bonus based on damage/late customer reports on boxes that passed through the facility is more likely to work than simply increasing base. Put everyone’s (extra) cash on the line and aligned with customer outcomes.
      • randallsquared 8y ago
        Sort of a tragedy-of-the-commons bonus, then? Individual employees have the power to block bonuses, but not the power to ensure that they are not blocked, under this plan.
        • sokoloff 8y ago
          More likely a community policing of the commons. It’s not like Joe is secretly taking a package into the men’s room and smashing it. He’s doing it in full view and awareness of his co-workers in all likelihood. “Hey Joe, stop that, you’re killing our bonus!”
    • rootusrootus 8y ago
      I'm willing to bet UPS has calculated this.
• justinhensley 8y ago
  I edited my comment because "gleeful" was misleading. All of them said that the primary reason for the rough treatment of packages was because they're trying to keep up with production and that they're incentives (bonuses) are volume base. It's a demanding job in a very fast paced environment. The people also have their managers coming by to periodically yell at them to "pick up the pace" or other more colorful language. The guy who said he purposely damages things was burnt out from working there for 5+ years. It brought out a side in him that I didn't know existed honestly. I was pretty shocked when he told me about it. Outside of work, he was extremely chill and fun to be around.
• chrsstrm 8y ago
  I've worked on multiple shipping and loading docks. If you haven't had this type of work experience it would be difficult to understand that the entire line is one big connected system. If just one person stalls their part of the process, the other pieces both upstream and downstream are affected. And believe me, everyone on the line instantly knows who is falling behind and you'll begin to feel the eyes on you immediately. If the issue is not resolved quickly, the entire line might need to stop, which is rule #1 that you don't ever do. Sometimes you just get behind and realizing you need to catch up quickly, 0 fucks are given. If you're stacking and shipping a pallet every couple minutes then you're not going to care about a single case or two being damaged. Is the box torn open because you threw it? Fine, turn it around on the pallet so no one can see the tear - problem solved. Is the supervisor riding you for being too slow? Fine, I'll show them who's slow, because it isn't me - look how fast I can do my job (without caring about what gets broken). Your job isn't to care what happens to these thousands of mystery boxes you're handling each day, it's just to get them out the damn door on time. The mood issue is real as well and it's less about personal feelings in general and more driven by how you're being treated at work. Any shift in the normal routine can set the mood of the entire warehouse and in return lead people into not caring. It could be announced mandatory overtime or even something as simple as removing something from the break room. Retaliatory action isn't seen as an inconvenience against the customer, it's a middle finger to corporate. You treat us like shit and we're going to make you feel it too, proxied through customer complaints about broken or missing items. Some individuals do go off the rails and it's usually related to some sort of perceived slight against them by the company. A lot of these could have been squashed if the manager didn't throw up their arms and say there was nothing they could do about it; take it up with HR. Most of the time if someone in corporate had just listened to the issue and let the employee get it off their chest, that would have been enough to calm the anger. What many white collar employees in the front office don't realize is how seriously some small and inconsequential issues can matter to blue collar laborers. This could go on and on about blue vs. white collar relations and management practices, but the point is that it's not about the customer so much as it is about internal politics and maintaining the status quo.
  • rdiddly 8y ago
    I can corroborate most of this. Basically it's a stressful job, with low pay, weird hours, and very high turnover. Some people handle the stress better than others. Generally when people leave, it's because they burn out, or reach some kind of "last straw" moment, or get physically injured (often the back, from lifting improperly and/or too fast). The company doesn't care, they're just using you up and they'll hire a new one when you leave. "Fragile" and other special instructions printed on the box are kind of insulting if you think about it. On the one hand, I'm a "professional" doing this for a living, so it's not like I need instruction from your I've-never-loaded-a-truck ass. And on the other hand, do I look like I have time to give your precious package special attention and follow your additional instructions for how it should be handled? It will be handled like all the rest. Maybe worse now that you pissed me off. My pet peeve was the packing. If you've done a proper job of packing, i.e. fulfilling your responsibility to secure your stuff, you quickly find you don't need to proclaim "Fragile" on the outside. But if you don't pack well, and then write "Fragile" on it, you're kind of trying to transfer your responsibilities to me, and deserve a lesson. This was judgmental young me talking, by the way. It's been a while since I did this. But speaking of judgment I also should mention the ultimate worthlessness of most of what people went to the trouble to ship. I handled a lot of B2B stuff, such as a region's worth of cigarette advertising for all the (insert name of convenience store chain here) in that region. Invariably marked "Fragile."
• usrusr 8y ago
  Just a guess regarding shipping, but a general observation that probably applies there as well: appearing significantly more careful than average will make you seem weak to your peers. On top of that they would hate you for demonstrating that it could be done better, like being the guy who does not drive n over posted speed limit (n varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but is a positive number almost everywhere). And bosses probably expect speed and care, in that order, but that isn't the main mechanism.
• PSZD 8y ago
  Working at a large brown shipping company, I've never seen anyone go out of their way to mistreat packages marked as fragile (or anyone talk about doing it). That said, it's policy not to treat packages marked 'fragile' differently. Boxes get reused a lot, and a sticker like that has very little correlation with it actually being fragile. (60lb box of bolts? Fragile! 2' by 4' mirror that shatters from a 1 ft drop? Not fragile!) For bicycles in particular, the issue IMO is that they're typically packed terribly, while being large and awkward enough to be handled with all the other large and heavy (70-150 lbs) stuff. Damages will occur, it's just a matter of statistical frequency at a scale of 20 million packages per day handled by 100,000+ employees. Frequently, the damage won't even be discovered until delivery, and then there's no easy way to attribute the damage properly. That means aside from particularly egregious stuff where it's obvious you screwed up (say, laying a 55" TV flat and dropping a 30 lb box on it) you have to go way up the management chain to find anyone who cares. At a lower level, easily measured metrics like process rate are far more important. If everyone in management you ever interacted with only measured your performance by LOC written, how much time would you spend refactoring?
• hnick 8y ago
  If you treat people like a replaceable cog in a machine, they'll meet your expectations.