Journalist Pride Comes to a Fall: Journalist Delivers Packages

This was top-link news on Drudge Report today (December 26, 2018)

I think it's fitting and quite funny that legacy media is not just in such rapid decline, but they are begging for bread from other corporate entities just to get by.

Amazon's CEO announced that they would not last forever. Such is the power of a truly free market. How much longer will former journalists last in any kind of work?

Austin Murphy

I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages forAmazon.

Holiday parties were right around the corner, and I needed a cover story. I didn’t feel like admitting to casual acquaintances, or even to some good friends, that I drive a van for Amazon. I decided to tell them, if asked, that I consult for Amazon, which is loosely true: I spend my days consulting a Rabbit, the handheld Android device loaded with the app that tells me where my next stop is, how many packages are coming off the van, and how hopelessly behind I’ve fallen.

Notice the arrogance. He is a delivery man, but hides his new career as a "Consultant." That seems to be the rage for these arrogant elites. What is the matter with them? They so long disdained the working man, the middle-income worker, the people who put the pedal to the metal and make a difference in our daily lives.

And now they had to do the same kind of work which they so keenly despised. What a brutal turnaround!

Let’s face it, when you’re a college-educated 57-year-old slinging parcels for a living, something in your life has not gone according to plan. That said, my moments of chagrin are far outnumbered by the upsides of the job, which include windfall connections with grateful strangers. There’s a certain novelty, after decades at a legacy media company—Time Inc.—in playing for the team that’s winning big, that’s not considered a dinosaur, even if that team is paying me $17 an hour (plus OT!). It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III), to be a minority in my workplace, and in some of the neighborhoods where I deliver. As Amazon reaches maximum ubiquity in our lives (“Alexa, play Led Zeppelin”), as online shopping turns malls into mausoleums, it’s been illuminating to see exactly how a package makes the final leg of its journey.

The journalist has been made redundant, and he goes out of his way to hold onto all the left-wing talking points, from white male privilege, to the technological revolution and the post-moral failures of their thinking.

These liberals just don't get it, do they?

There’s also a bracing feeling of independence that attends piloting my own van, a tingle of anticipation before finding out my route for the day. Will I be in the hills above El Cerrito with astounding views of the bay, but narrow roads, difficult parking, and lots of steps? Or will my itinerary take me to gritty Richmond, which, despite its profusion of pit bulls, I’m starting to prefer to the oppressive traffic of Berkeley, where I deliver to the brightest young people in the state, some of whom may wonder, if they give me even a passing thought: What hard luck has befallen this man, who appears to be my father’s age but is performing this menial task?

"Piloting my own van." Seriously? Are we sure that this guy wasn't fired? Bad writing, unethical aspersions against Americans of all backgrounds, the very term "legacy" to describe writing for Sports Illustrated

Thanks for asking!

The hero’s journey, according to Joseph Campbell, features a descent into the belly of the beast: Think of Jonah in the whale, or me locked in the cargo bay of my Ram ProMaster on my second day on the job, until I figured out how to work the latch from the inside. During this phase of the journey, the hero becomes “annihilate to the self”—brought low, his ego shrunk, his horizons expanded. This has definitely been my experience working for Jeff Bezos.

OK ... now he wants to claim that he has indeed been humbled. But the truth is that we have yet to see any kind of humility. The fact that he is comparing his downcast situation to Jonah is a little far-fetched, to say the least. Does he even believe in God?

During my 33 years at Sports Illustrated, I wrote six books, interviewed five U.S. presidents, and composed thousands of articles for SI and SI.com. Roughly 140 of those stories were for the cover of the magazine, with which I parted ways in May of 2017. Since then, as Jeff Lebowski explains to Maude between hits on a postcoital roach, “my career has slowed down a little bit.”

Funny. Sports Illustrated went down the tubes, or they had to cut back on their staff only because of the technology revolution? How about the fact that people got tired of the relentless politicizing that had overtaken the sports pages, networks, as well as the magazines?

Still, it's tough for people have to give up their prized, intended profession for something else, especially after working in that career for more than 30 years.

This proved problematic when my wife and I decided to refinance our home. Although Gina, an attorney, earns plenty, we needed a bit more income to persuade lenders to work with us. It quickly became clear that for us to qualify, I would need more than occasional gigs as a freelance writer; I would need a steady job with a W-2. Thus did I find myself, after replying to an indeed.com posting for Amazon delivery drivers, emerging from an office-park lavatory a few miles from my house, feigning nonchalance as I handed a cup of urine to the attendant and bid him good day.

Why would he worry about sending a urine sample to someone? What gives?

Little did I know, while delivering that drug-test sample, that this most basic of human needs—relieving oneself—would emerge as one of the more pressing challenges faced by all “delivery associates,” especially those of us crowding 60. An honest recounting of this job must include my sometimes frantic searches for a place to answer nature’s call.

Wow. Do I really need to read about this? Is this how low you went in the push from journalism to package delivery?

To cut its ballooning delivery costs—money it was shelling out to UPS and FedEx—Amazon recently began contracting out its deliveries to scores of smaller companies, including the one I work for. Amazon trains us, and provides us with uniform shirts and hats, but not with a ride. Before 7 a.m., we report to a parking lot near the warehouse where we select a vehicle from our company’s motley fleet of white and U-Haul vans.

Wow. You mean Big Business, the same corporations whose praises you were singing in your reports, takes advantage of its employees and cuts costs at the expense of the health and welfare of its employees? Really?!

I’m an Aries, so it stands to reason that I’m partial to Dodge Ram ProMasters. I like their profile and tight turning radius: That’s key, since we make about 100 U-turns and K-turns a day. Problem is, most of the drivers in our company—there are about 40 of us—share my preference. The best vans go to drivers with seniority, even if they show up after I do. Before it was taken out of service for repairs, I was often stuck with a ProMaster that had issues: Side-view mirrors spiderwebbed; the left mirror held fast to the body of the van by several layers of shrink-wrap. The headlights didn’t work unless flicked into “bright” mode, which means that when delivering after dark, I was blinding and infuriating oncoming motorists.

Once again, we see the entitled elitist peering through his "self-effacing" report on changing places and changing careeers. He wants to complain about the type of vehicle that he drives? He wants to play compare and contrast with other employees and the rides that they select for themselves?

I drove that beast on my worst day so far. After a solid morning and early afternoon, I glanced at the Rabbit and sighed. It was taking me to that fresh hell that is 3400 Richmond Parkway, several hundred apartments set up in a mystifying series of concentric circles. The Rabbit’s GPS doesn’t work there, the apartment numbers are difficult to find, and the lady in the office informed me that I couldn’t leave packages with her. She did, however, hand me a map resembling the labyrinth of ancient Greece. I spent an hour wandering, ascending flights of stairs that took me, usually, to the incorrect apartment. By now deep in the hole, with no shot at completing my appointed rounds for the day, I set a forlorn course for my next stop at the nearby Auto Mall. That’s when I heard a thud-thud-thud from the area of my right front tire, which was so old and bald that it had begun to shed four- and five-inch strips of rubber, which were thumping against the wheel well.

Poor baby! Can't stand a hard day's work, huh?

Although it was only 4 p.m., I called it quits. Some days in the delivery biz, the bear eats you. But I got some perspective back at the lot, where a fellow driver named Shawn told me about the low point of his day. A woman had challenged him as he emerged from her side yard—where he’d been dropping a package, as instructed. “What are you stealing?”

“That sucks,” I said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“It's cool,” he told me. “I called her a bitch.”

Fun.

For both days of my safety training, I sat next to and befriended Will, who now shows up for work wearing every Amazon-themed article of clothing he can get his hands on: shirt, ball cap, Amazon beanie pulled over Amazon ball cap. I found that odd at first, but it makes good sense. If you’re a black man and your job is to walk up to a stranger’s front door—or, if the customer has provided such instructions, to the side or the back of the property—then yes, rocking Amazon gear is a way to protect yourself, to proclaim, “I’m just a delivery guy!”

He has to bring back the race card. What a shame. This guy can't rid of his left-wing worldview, which is probably why he bemoans his new lot in life.

Let us recall: his wife remains a high-powered lawyer, they own a home which they can refinance, and he has another job which pays pretty well (with overtime!). Yet he whines about his change of fortune. Whomp Whomp!

That safety training, incidentally, is comprehensive and excellent. After two days in the classroom, all of us had to pass a “final exam.” It wasn’t a slam dunk. In my experience, however, some of the guidelines Amazon hammers home to us (seat belts must be worn at all times; the reverse gear is to be used as seldom as possible; driveways are not to be blocked while making deliveries) must be thrown overboard if we’re going to come close to finishing our routes.

And there’s the bathroom issue.

The google search Amazon driver urinates summons a cavalcade of caught-in-the-act videos depicting poor saps, since fired, who simply couldn’t hold it any longer. While their decision to pee in the side yard—or on the front porch!—of a customer is not excusable, it is, to those of us in the Order of the Arrow (my made-up name for Amazon delivery associates), understandable.

No sense of deceny. None. How about identifying a key location and going to that place for your bathroom needs as needed? That shouldn't be too hard, now, should it?

Before sending me out alone, the company assigned me two “ride-alongs” with its top driver, the legendary Marco, who went out with 280 packages the second day I rode shotgun with him, took his full lunch break, did not roll through a single stop sign, and was finished by sundown. Marco taught me to keep a lookout not just for porch pirates—lowlifes who swoop in behind us to pilfer packages—but also for portable toilets. In neighborhoods miles from a service station or any public lavatory, a Port-a-John, or a Honey Pot, can be no less welcome than an oasis in the desert. (The afternoon I leapt from the van and beelined to a Honey Pot, only to find it padlocked, was the closest I’ve come to crying on the job.)

Delivering in El Sobrante one day, I popped into a convenience store on San Pablo Avenue. I bought an energy bar, but that was a mere pretext. “I wonder if I might use your lavatory,” I asked the proprietor, a gentleman of Indian descent, judging by his accent, in a dapper beret.

A cloud passed over his face. “You make number one or two?”

“Just one!” I promised. He inclined his head toward the back of the store, in the direction of the “Employees only” bathroom.

After thanking him on my way out, I mentioned that I was new at Amazon, still figuring out restroom strategies.

“Amazon drivers, FedEx drivers, UPS, Uber, Lyft—everybody has to go.”

But where? When no john can be found, when the delivery associate is denied permission to use the gas-station bathroom, he is sometimes left with no other choice than to repair to the dark interior of the cargo bay—the belly of the beast—with an empty Gatorade bottle.

I just want everyone to realize that this 33-year veteran journalist has not only been reduced to telling us long tales about his pursuit for a place to pee. Really.

It was late afternoon on a Monday when I may or may not have been forced to such an extreme. I was dispensing packages on Primrose Lane in Pinole, and I remember thinking, afterward: Aside from the fact that my checking account is overdrawn and I’m 30 deliveries behind and the sun will be down in an hour and I’m about to take a furtive whiz in the back of a van, life really is a holiday on Primrose Lane!

Why was his checking account overdrawn? Why did he feel compelled to bring that into the story?

Pinole, incidentally, is the hometown of the ex–Miami Hurricanes quarterback Gino Torretta, a great guy who won the Heisman Trophy in 1992. I covered him then, and a few years later when he was playing for the Rhein Fire in the NFL’s World League. Gino and I hoisted a stein or two at a beer hall in Düsseldorf. Some of the American players were having trouble enunciating the German farewell, auf Wiedersehen. To solve that problem, they would say these words as rapidly as possible: Our feet are the same!

So, we have a former Sports Illustrated writer who lives in the wildly overpriced South Bay section of the San Francisco Bay Area. No wonder he complains about the high cost of living Notice also that he draws out all kinds of sob stories about his once glorious career, including a specific professional athlete, all drawn from the city where he is dropping off packages.

Narcissism rears its ugly head again.

Performing my new job, I’m frequently reminded of my old one, whether it’s driving past Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, where I covered countless Pac-12 games, or listening to NFL contests during Sunday deliveries. I’ve talked and laughed with many of the players and coaches and general managers and owners whose names I hear.

Oh, how the mighty are fallen, right?

Sitting in traffic one damp December morning, I turned on the radio to hear George W. Bush eulogizing his father. His speech was funny, rollicking, loving, and poignant. It was pitch-perfect. In the summer of 2005, after returning from the Tour de France—cycling was my beat during the reign of Lance Armstrong—I was invited, along with five other journalists, to ride mountain bikes with W. on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The Iraq War was going sideways; 43 needed some positive press. I jumped at the chance, even though I loathed many of his policies. In person, Bush was disarming, charming, funny. (These days, compared with the current potus, he seems downright Churchillian.) I wrote two accounts, one for the magazine, another for the website. Got a nice note from him a couple weeks later.

A confirmed liberal, just as I had guesses. And a biased liberal who hates Donald Trump. Wow, color me surprised!

Lurching west in stop-and-go traffic on I-80 that morning, bound for Berkeley and a day of delivering in the rain, I had a low moment, dwelling on how far I’d come down in the world. Then I snapped out of it. I haven’t come down in the world. What’s come down in the world is the business model that sustained Time Inc. for decades. I’m pretty much the same writer, the same guy. I haven’t gone anywhere. My feet are the same.

Yes, you have gone somewhere, into a bale of self-righteous irrelevance. 

When I’m in a rhythm, and my system’s working, and I slide open the side door and the parcel I’m looking for practically jumps into my hand, and the delivery takes 35 seconds and I’m on to the next one, I enjoy this gig. I like that it’s challenging, mentally and physically. As with the athletic contests I covered for my old employer, there’s a resolution, every day. I get to the end of my route, or I don’t. I deliver all the packages, or I don’t.

That’s what I ended up sharing with people at the first Christmas party of the season. It felt better, when they asked how I was doing, to just tell the truth.

This is also true: Gina and I got approved for that loan last week, meaning that our monthly outlay, while not so minuscule that it can be drowned in Grover Norquist’s figurative bathtub, is now far more manageable, thanks in part to these daily journeys which I consider, in their minor way, heroic.

Delivering packages is heroic? Seriously?

Final Reflection

The arrogance, the self-serving pre-eminence is hard to avoid, isn't it? How far had he really fallen, this legacy journalist overlooking his tired, lost legacy?

Not far enough, if you ask me. His crass liberalism unabated, his sense of self-importance still on the field, it's clear that this man's pride has not been dashed deeply enough. This guy is so-filled with this idea that he was the king-maker because he was a reporter, and yet he has learned the hard way that whatever you are selling, someone has to be buying.

And lots of people simply were not interested in buying souped-up liberal propaganda in the midst of sports. People want to see a decent game, and they want people to play, to have fun. And the Left can't stand the idea of anyone having fun.

Now we have a reported who turns his little challenges into front-page news. Who really cares that this guy struggles to find a place to urinate while delivering packages? Who cares, really?

What makes this report so gratifying, though, and intriguing is that it mirrors the general decline of the corrupted, liberal media.

And this downfall is spectacular!