Twenty-six years ago, the sort of friendly rapport that he and many UPS drivers have with their customers helped fuel public support for UPS’s workers when they went on strike with their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “I take pride in servicing my customers,” he told me, “and my customers and I have a great relationship.” Another driver might have grown tired of this job, but Andrews has not. He has delivered just about everything, from dog food to exercise bicycles to fake Christmas trees. Hour after hour, he does the dance of the UPS driver: driving a block or two, turning off the ignition, unbuckling his seat belt, pulling in his sideview mirror, searching in the back for parcels, climbing out, delivering them to customers. Before his workday ends, he has to deliver-or attempt to deliver-each of the hundred and forty parcels in the back of his package car. He later jokes that, when he’s on his route, “I feel like I’m running for office, like I’m on the podium and I’m waving with both hands.”Īndrews is forty-six years old, slim and bald, with a salt-and-pepper beard, which is fairly new, because, until 2020, UPS prohibited its drivers from having beards. As he walks out of Walgreens, he taps the man on the shoulder and says, “Nice to see you!” All day long, Andrews waves to people he knows, and they wave back. The man once worked in a neighborhood bar, and when Andrews used to walk in with a delivery the man always offered him a beer-“On the house!”-which Andrews would decline. When he rings the bell of a house one afternoon, the customer greets him with a fist bump: “What’s up, bro?” When he drops off a package at Walgreens, he recognizes an elderly man in the checkout line. For nearly twenty years, Antoine Andrews has been driving a UPS route in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge.
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