May Update |
By now, most of you have probably heard about the additional 2% raise for top-of-scale couriers which we're slated to receive October 1st. That means that Fedex employees across the country have now only lost roughly 23.6% in real earnings to inflation over the past 7 years. So all Fred has to do is give us 8% raises every year for the next 4 years and by the time we start the 21st century (it really begins January 1, 2001) we'll all be caught up and our standard of living will be restored to the lap of luxury we were all living in seven years ago! Any bets that Fred will ever do that?
Let's face it. We'll never get out of the hole Fred's put us all in, even with a union. But, it's a sure thing that without a union, we will all go further in the hole with each passing year! I won't even bother to tell you again to seek out your local union officials to thank them for this latest announced raise. If you aren't convinced by now that we owe every penny of these two unprecedented raises to the union efforts to organize FedEx employees going on all across the country, then you are beyond any reasoning capabilities I possess!
We FedExers in northern Illinois are really confused over the news of this latest raise. Why just last month, our senior managers were all telling us how badly the company was doing and how terribly close those downward sloping graph lines they showed us were to intersecting, thus marking red ink territory for the company. Now, as if by magic, money has been discovered to give us not one, but two raises in a single year! Did Fred discover an old mattress in the family mansion's attic that his granny had stuffed with money? Did Ted stumble across a forgotten corporate Swiss bank account book in the back of a desk drawer? Was Ken going over the corporate books when he discovered that a careless accountant had misplaced a decimal point somewhere?
It's clear, at least to those of us in northern Illinois, that something miraculous has happened! To go from famine to feast in less than a month is a helluva accomplishment for a corporation! After all, we know our senior managers would never lie to us about the company being on the verge of financial ruin, so something bordering on divine intervention must have happened in the last 30 days at FedEx....
I actually had an anti-union employee who writes me regularly attribute this windfall we top-of-range hourly employees have experienced in 1997 to the success of our new Express Saver program coupled with our profitable International Service. If he's right, why did management gather us together to deliver last month's gloom and doom sermons? Did the corporate honchos in Memphis keep our district management in the dark about the successes of our Express Saver and International services so they'd all look like liars to the thousands of employees in our district a scant month later?
I've only been with FedEx for 11 years, so I can only speak for that period of time, but I've never seen two raises in a single year in all that time. I doubt that such a thing has ever happened before in FedEx's entire history. It is also clear that FedEx has never faced such a concerted and escalating attempt to unionize its work force as has come into being this past year. No reasonable person can therefore discount the obvious connection between these unique circumstances. If the mere threat of a union in its embryonic stages can render these results, can anyone doubt that things would dramatically improve for us all if we actually had a union in place at FedEx?
Is there anyone left who places any stock whatsoever in the annual SFA? The company announced the results of the SFA in the May 12th issue of "This Week" and when I read them, I was convinced that the SFA isn't worth the time we use to take it! FedEx claims that there were improvements in 23 surveyed items while only one item showed a decline! This at a time when more FedExers are seeking out union officials and filing election petitions than ever before in the company's history! Just in the month of May alone, the Teamsters filed two more stations in northern Illinois and I just received word that a station in PA has more than 50% of its employees signed on. These are just the stations I've heard from in the past couple of weeks! Since I'm not the central clearing house for all union news, there's no telling what kinds of success stories from other parts of the country are unfolding at this moment!
One thing I do know for certain, and that is that the volume of e-mail I'm receiving from FedExers with horror stories to tell is increasing every week! Furthermore, the levels of intimidation and incidents of management harassment of pro-union employees are escalating. Management's paranoia of employee unity and information sharing is increasing as the unions knock ever-harder at Fred's door. I just spoke with an employee who had a manager confiscate his printout of an article from my web site from among the personal effects he had in the cab of his truck. The manager refused to return this employee's property even though he clearly identified it as belonging to him. Bear in mind that this employee was not distributing this material at the time it was confiscated. He merely had it in the locked cab of his vehicle while he was working elsewhere in the station!
I guess the SFA results could have improved this year. There might also be a spaceship behind comet Hale-Bopp...
We're really working for a "People" kind of company, aren't we? Our managers are so anxious to slam the door on us that they can't even wait until a sick employee gets well before they bounce her fanny out the door! But hey! In all fairness, they did also chauffeur her back home again after her termination.... Makes you wonder, doesn't it? What would those zealous SJCA managers have done if the employee in question had been lying in a bed in a hospital on life support? Would they have made the pilgrimage to her bedside to serve her those walking papers? Would they have then pulled the plug on her IV drip and/or respirator reasoning that she was no longer eligible for her corporate paid health care? Would they have confiscated her wheelchair? I wouldn't put anything past those wild and crazy SJCA managers!
Customer service agents at FedEx may soon become an endangered species! I just recently learned that FedEx routes its "overflow" calls to customer service to a third party call center in the sun belt where coolie wages are commonplace. It's obvious that reaching the "overflow" call rate is entirely in management's hands and depends upon whatever level at which they decide to man our call centers with FedEx employees. It would be easy for management to continuously lower the threshold of the "overflow" point by simply not replacing CSAs lost through various means of attrition. My source informed me that the company she knows about which handles the overflow calls from her call center pays its employees barely above the minimum wage. Is it any wonder that I'm hearing first hand accounts of customers who never receive promised call backs and follow up action on claims and other problems with their shipments? Corporate America seems determined to reduce the workers in this country to third world wage earner levels at the very same time in our history when news of the stock market setting new record highs has become commonplace and FedEx management seems to have no reservations about being one of the corporations at the forefront of this trend...
Out in Modesto, CA Pilar Barton, the heroine of the successful union drive at that station appeared in an article in the Modesto Bee newspaper. Coincidentally, she was also written up by her manager for a misdelivery! That's a new one on me folks! What's next? In the meantime, one of Pilar's coworkers scrawled anti-union graffiti on her locker that remained there for over a week as of the last time I spoke to her! When someone wrote pro-union graffiti on a bathroom wall at our station, management had the wall scrubbed clean in less than an hour! I guess the housekeeping crew at Modesto has other priorities... huh? Pilar also received a message on her DADs terminal asking her when she was going to learn to "mind her own business." The dispatcher didn't happen to catch the content of the message so it was routed to Pilar and he didn't become aware of the message content until she had received it and brought it to dispatch's attention. Fortunately, Pilar was able to obtain a printout of the message so she has proof it was indeed sent to her and since a certain manager in Modesto has repeatedly used the phrase "mind your own business" in speaking to Pilar, she's pretty certain where this piece of FedEx hate mail originated from.... There's a lesson to be learned in this folks. Don't put anything past management!
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If you've visited the Bravo Zulu web site that is linked from my site's "Hot Links" page, you already know the background story of Captain Claude "Barney" Barnhart. If you haven't read about him, you really ought to take the time to do so! Here's a man, quite literally an American war hero who was awarded two Distinguished Flying Crosses for flying B-52s in Vietnam, who has now joined the ranks of those unjustly persecuted and terminated by FedEx!
I won't rehash Barney's story here because it is readily available for you to read at the Bravo Zulu site, but I would like to take this opportunity to offer my insight into his situation. What I believe we have here is a clear case of the inmates running the asylum. Barney was accused of being "unbalanced" by the wife of a pilot who opposed ALPA. The basis of her accusations were some hyperbolic statements Barney had made on a Compuserve forum catering to airline pilots. As I have been engaging in online discussions in cyberspace since 1984, I consider myself fairly well-versed in the kinds of rhetoric people engage in regularly via their computer keyboards. Based upon my extensive experience in online communicating, I feel I do have the credentials to accurately comment on the subject.
One very notable thing about communicating online is how easy it is to reach a much larger audience than one could attract if one were to go to the neighborhood park and stand atop a soap box. Yet, as easy as it is to reach a large number of people, cyberspace also offers the less desirable opportunity of inadvertently being misunderstood by a whole lot of people as well. That's because writing, unless it is done very carefully, can easily be misinterpreted by the reader. Writing cannot easily convey an author's intentions nearly as well as verbal face-to-face communicating because one's words are not accompanied by facial expressions and variations in vocal pitch. I can't begin to count the number of times in the 13 years I've been online where I've witnessed people getting their feelings hurt or becoming angry over online statements made by others who had no intention whatsoever to do either of those things to the injured party.
Another characteristic of online communication is its impersonal nature. Since you can't see or hear the person you are communicating with, all you really are to them are so many words strung together on their monitor's screen. In an effort to personalize their online communications, people often adopted the practice of using a "handle" with their online communications, like those truckers use on CB radio, which was either descriptive of their interests or simply had a bit of pizazz. Online services such as Compuserve and AOL offer use of customized user IDs or "handles" and thousands of people elect to use such nicknames. There's nothing sinister in this practice whatsoever. It is merely an attempt to add a personal touch to an otherwise impersonal and limited form of communication.
Most of us are not great writers. If we had chosen writing as our careers, we certainly wouldn't be driving trucks or piloting aircraft for FedEx. So if we are misunderstood in our online communications, that would seem to be a very common and predictable outcome of our status as neophyte writers. Yet, simply because Barney wrote things which some people chose to interpret as threatening or delusional, he was singled out for persecution by FedEx despite the fact that thousands, if not millions of very normal folks have fallen victim to the same type of misinterpretation since the invention of writing! It seems that in order to pilot a FedEx aircraft, one not only has to be adept at flying, but now one must also be a proficient writer as well.
If Captain Barnhart is guilty of anything, it would be that he expected more clarity from online communications than his writing skills and the present state of technology offers. He is guilty of nothing more than that! Yet, that simple and commonplace mistake was sufficient to give a woman fits of paranoia and set off the alarms at FedEx's "thought police" headquarters!
How many times in your life have you used an expression like "I'd rather die than do that!"? When confronted with the prospect of doing something I feel is extremely distasteful, one of my favorite expressions is "I'd sooner piss on a power line!" It's a good thing that I'm not a FedEx pilot, for if I were, Fred would likely have me hauled off to a shrink and accuse me of suicidal tendencies for making such a statement in the presence of the wrong candy ass! Can't you just envision the court proceedings in Barney's case now? Some anti-ALPA pilot will be called upon to testify that he once heard Barney say "This steak tastes like shit!" FedEx's lawyers will then proceed to accuse Barney of being mentally unbalanced because he obviously has eaten feces at some time if he can compare the taste of a steak to it!
As far as Barney's use of the handle "Claudius Magnus" goes, it's utterly ridiculous that anyone could make anything out of that. In my correspondence with friends who have known me for a long time, I often sign my messages and letters as "The Wizard of Oz" because that's a nickname I picked up in Nam. Yet, like "Claudius Magnus," the uninitiated could choose to accuse me of having delusions of grandeur by daring to use such a nickname in my online correspondence!
There's more to Barney's case than FedEx humiliating him by demanding he take a psychiatric exam over something as ridiculous as online hyperbole. Privacy of online communications is the central issue from what I've read about his situation. In my humble opinion though, the key issue should be the limited ability of written communications to accurately convey an amateur writer's true intentions. For if FedEx is successful in contesting Barney's complaints, his case could have a chilling effect on everyone who communicates in cyberspace in the future! If cyberspace becomes full of legal land mines where an off-the-cuff remark or exaggeration can be used as a basis for legal persecution of the hapless offender, then cyberspace will indeed become a very drab place where only the most careful of writers will dare to tread...
Back when the process of galvanizing FedExers in the Chicago area was in its infancy, someone suggested the notion of forming an "in house" union of FedEx workers. This person wanted to take up a collection from our coworkers, hire an attorney and go toe-to-toe with Fred from that vantage point. I was immediately opposed to the idea and voiced that opposition vehemently. The idea was subsequently dropped, but from time to time, someone will again make such a suggestion. I figure that now is as good a time as any to address the topic of "in-house" unions.
I'm not conversant in the issues that our pilots had with management which caused them to unionize. About all I know of that situation is that someone managed to convince the pilots to drop ALPA and form their own "in-house" union. From what I understand, FedEx management strongly and actively encouraged the "in-house" union proponents which, in and of itself, should have set off alarms and sent up red flags in the mind of any serious thinker in the pilots' ranks! If your opponent sponsors something, how good can it possibly be for you?
Again, I must reiterate that I know nothing about the FPA. For all I know, they might have their own union hall, lawyers, and a full time staff of people who storm Fred's office on behalf of members who lodge grievances. However, I picture an "in-house" union as being an entity that is largely dependant on the whims of management with little, if any, effective infrastructure for confronting management with any meaningful clout. I recently told someone via e-mail that an "in-house" union reminds me of the mini-series "Roots" where I first heard the expression "house nigger" used to describe the few privileged slaves who were given the "honor" of serving in the "Massuh's" house rather than toiling out in the fields. The criteria for being a successful "house nigger" was to be as ingratiating towards the "Massuh" as possible....
Al Ferrier, the founding father of the movement to unionize FedEx, has recently informed me that he will be launching a web site for FedEx employees in the near future. Though his site will be limited to text only due to the limitations of the Web TV network he uses to access the Internet, I'm sure that his wisdom in dealing with FedEx will more than make up for any lack of cosmetics! I'll let everyone know when the site goes online and will create a link from my site to his at that time as well.
In the meantime, Al has asked me to solicit some information from all of you. As you know, Al was terminated from FedEx several months ago and is now gathering information for a lawsuit against the company. He is looking for any and all information about employees who have been terminated who meet one or more of the following criteria.
1. Had become injured or disabled in the 24 months prior to their termination.
2. Were over 40 years old.
3. Had 9 or more years of service at FedEx.
If you know of anyone who was terminated that meets any of the above criteria, please send e-mail to Al at fedxuawgftman@webtv.net. I'd also like a copy of this information for my own files and possible use on this site so if you send a response to Al, I'd appreciate it if you'd send me a copy as well.
One of the personal benefits I receive from running this web site is that I get smarter every day because there are so many absolutely brilliant people who work for FedEx and they freely share their wisdom with yours truly! Pilar Barton is just such a sharing individual whose verbal eloquence and intellect is absolutely awesome! She recently recommended a book to me which, judging by the extensive quote that accompanied her endorsement, is a "must-read" for any working stiff in this country! The name of the book is "Working Smart" by Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter. I won't excerpt the book as extensively as Pilar did because this is a public venue where copyright issues come into play, but here are a couple of lines from the book that illustrate just how meaningful its content is to workers at FedEx.
"There must be a special rung of hell reserved for managers who say, "you're lucky to have this job". Unions are not formed to grant any old jobs to grateful workers, but to make these jobs good jobs. We should see good jobs not as a luxury or a memory of the good old days, but as a right. Not only for ourselves, but our children's children."
In four sentences, Mr. Parker and Ms. Slaughter capture the essence of the idiots who tell us "If you don't like it,... quit!" and the FedEx of today where having a job you enjoy and look forward to is but a memory that grows more vague with each passing day.
"A basic element of a good job is freedom of fear. It's not a good job if you dread losing it so much you will kiss up to keep it. No matter how well paid it's not a good job if you fear your carpal tunnels won't last till retirement."
I wish it were possible to share every piece of e-mail I get with all of you! Most of you have absolutely no idea how great the level of fear is among so many of your coworkers! I can't count how many times I've read phrases like "Please don't print my story!" or "Please don't use my name or station identifier if you print any of this on your site!" Even folks who have more years with the company than I do and who have submitted articles for use on the site agonize over whether or not to let me "out" them here for fear of reprisals. Given the kind of harassment Pilar has recently experienced in Modesto, is it any wonder that folks are scared to speak out against the company above a whisper in a darkened corner of the station?
As for the fear that one won't be able to physically make it to retirement, that's a possibility more and more FedExers will have to come to grips with as our most senior employees begin to near retirement eligibility in the next couple of years. That particular sentence from the book struck uncomfortably close to home for me! Bear with me while I share some personal background with you.
Last year, I stepped out of my Grumman with an armful of packages. Since I couldn't see the street surface where I was stepping over the pile of packages in my arms, I was unaware that a small chunk of wood was lying on the ground just below my vehicle's door. When I stepped down on the chunk of wood, I momentarily lost my balance and had to throw my leg out in front of me to keep from falling on my face. As I did so, I felt something tear in the area of my knee and wound up on my face anyway. I found that I couldn't put any weight on the knee so I picked up the packages and hauled myself back up into the driver's seat where I proceeded to inform dispatch that I needed someone to come and get my freight so I could return to the station and get someone to take me to the doctor.
I was out for about a month as I underwent X-rays, an MRI (which showed a partially torn ligament) and physical therapy. At the end of that month, I honestly felt fine and thought I was ready to go back to work again. At the end of my first day back, however, I began to feel that all was not quite right with the old knee. My leg stiffened up just in the 20 minutes it took for me to drive home that afternoon. When I got home, I iced the knee and took a couple of Ibuprofen tablets and the pain greatly diminished. I chalked it up to being back on the job after being off for a month and figured the stiffness would subside as the leg got back into shape. The next morning, the knee was stiff again so I again took a couple of Ibuprofens and that seemed to get me through the P1 cycle without much pain but when they wore off, the pain returned. After just five days back at work, I was up to taking 6 Ibuprofen capsules just to get the pain down to the level where I could hobble through the day. On the morning of the sixth day, I called my manager and told him I would be returning to our occupational injury health care providers to have the knee looked at again.
At this point in time, it would be useful for you to know that I had torn ligaments in my ankle while on the job some 9 years ago. Back then, Federal Express was using a different care provider for on-the-job injuries. That care provider put me in a removable cast and told me to stay off the ankle as much as possible. Nine weeks later, the cast came off and I went back to work without ever feeling a hint of residual pain in the ankle again! About five years ago, I busted my foot on the job. At that time, Federal Express was using an occupational injury clinic that was long-established and was locally renowned for treating the injuries of sports figures and athletes. The walls of the clinic were covered with autographed pictures of sports figures and athletes of both amateur and professional status. These photos were invariably embellished with notes of gratitude to the doctors at the clinic. They too put me in a cast. Fortunately I had kept my old removable cast so they let me use it rather than putting me in plaster as they had intended to do. Again, the prescription was stay off the foot and two months later, I was back on the job with a full head of steam! If you ask me today which ankle or foot was injured, I actually have to think about it before I can tell you!
When I returned to our present health care provider for my knee injury, they decided it was now time to send me to a specialist. The specialist examined me and asked me what sort of physical therapy I had been undergoing during the month I was off. He shook his head and told me that I should have not been doing stair-stepping type therapy and proceeded to put me on a lower impact regimen of physical therapy. He also ordered a knee brace for me to wear. Two more months went by, bringing my total time off work to over three months! During all this time off, I was constantly undergoing physical therapy and during the last two thirds of my absence, I was going in for three hours a day on TRTW (temporary return to work) duty where I stood and scanned the belt every morning. In other words, in all that time I never had anything remotely akin to the strict convalescence I had when I had injured myself the previous two times! The knee was never given a prolonged rest!
Today, though I am back at work, that knee constantly reminds me that all is not, and might never be, right with it! It is still stiff every morning and it still quickly stiffens up every time I stay off of it for as little as 15 minutes! I dared not stay off any longer with the injury due to my fear of impending displacement! I had stuck it out with FedEx's own doctors because I didn't want to be accused of going to a physician who would exaggerate or embellish my condition in my favor. I had also stuck with FedEx's doctors because I have heard of instances where the company that administers our Workmen's Compensation has refused to pay doctor bills if they decide that the diagnosis and treatment is in any way questionable in their opinion! It's noteworthy that the doctor I had been originally seeing during my first month had a horrible reputation among FedEx employees, management included!
While I have absolutely zero medical training aside from the first-aid classes the Army sent me through, I am able to make some reasonable assumptions about FedEx's current health care providers (at least here in Chicago) as well the company's TRTW policy. Our present medicos seem to embrace a "paint it with iodine and mark 'em for duty" philosophy that military physicians were (and may still be) notorious for. At the same time, FedEx's TRTW policy gives the company a tool by which the walking wounded can be exploited to the brink of outrage! Watching someone stumble around in a cast handing out truck keys and trackers leads one to believe that FedEx has no shame where taking advantage of it's employees is concerned. I doubt that anyone has been fooled by the intent of the TRTW policy either. Clearly, the policy was concocted to make being injured on the job as miserable an experience for employees as is possible. The company likely reasons that if they make an injured employee get up and come to work each morning, that employee will likely find convalescence far less enjoyable and will be more likely to return to work sooner because being off is hardly more restful than having to work a regular shift! When I was off for my knee, three times a week I attended an hour of physical therapy immediately after leaving work where I had already been standing in one place for three hours. By the time I was finished with both work and therapy on those days, I had already been on my feet for five or more hours! The other two days of the week, I was on my feet for four hours. Compare that treatment to the old Federal Express health care where convalescence was truly a time where one was allowed to rest one's injuries and let them heal!
One more thing! For those of you who have ever had an injury that required a cast, let me tell you that a removable cast is by far the most humane invention to ever come down the pike! While more expensive that a plaster cast, it is such a joy to be spared the itching, the stench, and have the ability to wash the injured part of your body! Unfortunately this kind of quality health care is a thing of the past at FedEx. I still have my removable cast carefully stored away just in case...
What does this all ultimately cost the company? Well, in my case at least, it added a full month to my recovery from an on-the-job injury. Nobody will ever convince me that I would have been off for more than three months if I had simply had this torn ligament treated in the same manner as my ankle injury had been 9 years ago! I firmly believe that had the doctors immobilized the injured area and had me stay off of it as much as possible for a couple of months, I would have returned to work a month earlier firing on all cylinders!
Okay, so what's this all got to do with Pilar's quote from "Working Smart?" Well, as it is now, I find myself wondering just how long my knee will hold out every time it stiffens up on me! I hold out the hope that it will last long enough for me to finally get enough points to successfully bid on an RTD position! Jumping in and out of a Grumman a hundred or so times a day on a knee that FedEx's health care providers never completely allowed to heal is an ongoing crap shoot for me. As rare as RTD positions are with all the subcontracting that is going on, my chances are slim to none of grabbing one before the knee decides to go south. In the Federal Express of yesteryear, I might have had a decent shot at getting an early morning shuttle run and only have to run a P1 route to get a full day's work. At today's FedEx, however, driving shuttles has become the exclusive domain of cargo handlers. For the sake of the almighty dollar, FedEx now gives what once were considered prime shuttle runs to its youngest and lowest paid employees thus slamming yet another door on a job that was custom made for older employees with seniority. With tractor-trailer jobs going to subcontractors and shuttles going to young cargo handlers, FedEx seems intent on working people until they literally fall apart and then it discards them with little more concern than driving an old heap to the scrap yard! In this way, FedEx imbues older employees with fear where their ability to actually do the job is concerned. In my case, all I had to do is substitute the word "knee" for "carpal tunnels" in the above quote from "Working Smart" to know that the authors had hit the nail on the head again!
"Unions' vision and struggle for a workplace of dignity, skill and worker control are necessary not just for union members, but our entire society."
The authors used my favorite word in this quote! Dignity! They also used it first in their list ingredients for a good workplace. That's because, in my humble opinion anyway, dignity is the most important intrinsic need of every human being that treads upon this ball of cosmic dust! Without dignity, one cannot ever attain any true measure of happiness in any other human endeavor. If you look in the mirror in the morning and see the face of a person who dreads facing the day because of the conditions under which you work, that dark cloud casts a shadow over every aspect of your conscious life. It doesn't just affect the enthusiasm you have for your work. It creeps subtly into your personal life as well. It may shorten your temper with your spouse or kids, lower your self-confidence and inhibit your willingness take chances that might enhance your life, be less trusting of friends or color your experience in any countless number of other ways.
Can you have dignity without power? Yes, but only if those that wield power over you use it carefully and judiciously! FedEx stopped wielding its power over us with such virtues years ago! Now, the only way to regain our collective and individual dignity is to shift power into the hands of people who will use it carefully and judiciously again. Those hands belong to us, the hourly workers of FedEx! The only way that power will ever be shifted away from FedEx is through the unification of the workforce. That unity, that union, will give us the strength to wrest that power from the corporate hands that currently clutch it so tightly!
The theory goes that everyone eventually gets 15 minutes of fame sometime in their lives. My turn came when one of my fellow union activists contacted the labor editor of the Chicago Sun Times and told her of our efforts and progress in organizing FedEx employees. Her interest was piqued and she asked him for the names of some other people who were active in the movement that might be willing to talk to her. Of course, my friend (I use that term loosely... I'll explain later) suggested she talk to me. To be fair, he did call and ask me if it was alright to give her my name but that still doesn't get him out of hot water (I'll explain later).
A few days later, the reporter in question called me and conducted a lengthy interview on the phone and then she sprang a request on me I hadn't expected. She asked me if she could send a staff photographer out to my home to take a photo of me in front of my computer for the article. I said it would be okay, but I did so figuring that my good buddy who started the whole thing would also be photographed for the article! After all, I already have a reputation for being one of the main troublemakers in the Chicago area as far as management is concerned, so I wasn't really looking to set myself apart from the crowd any further.
On May 13th, the article ran in the business section of the paper. I had asked the reporter to give me some notice when the article was going to be run, and she complied. She left a message on my answering machine after my wife and I had left for work... When I arrived at work that morning (I started about an hour after the sort started) it seemed as though everyone in the station had already seen or at least had heard about the article! People were coming up to me all morning offering their congratulations, thanks and expressions of admiration. I'll have to admit that it was a head-swelling experience. When I finally was given a copy of the article to look at, I began to understand why I was getting so much attention. It seems that my good buddy's photo was conspicuously missing from the article and I was the lone FedExer with my mug plastered in the article, in full color no less!
The article itself was pretty matter-of-fact and did not go into any great detail about the organizing effort. I could probably get permission to reprint the article for the site, but honestly folks, there was no new news in it and the reporter only quoted one thing I and my friend had said. I suppose any publicity is good publicity, but I sure could have used some company under the heat of that spotlight.... On the bright side, management now has a current photo of me to hang on on their dart boards!