Questions and Answers 1 in Everyday Things

How was your Christmas? Did you & Jasmine end up staying home?

Our Christmas was enjoyable :-). Ana had sent Jasmine a birthday/christmas box filled with lots of books and other goodies, so jasmine opened up the box for her birthday and left the rest for her to open on christmas. Her parents had also sent her a birthday/christmas box, so she opened those up christmas morning. Surprisingly, her parents got me a shirt for christmas lol.

Jocelyn wanted us to come over to her house for brunch and give us our gifts for christmas. She sweetened the pot by saying my mom was willing to make my all-time favorite Sunday dinner: roast and mac and cheese. My mom said she was going to make it before my birthday, but she wanted to wait until christmas to do it smh. I wanted to try my hand at cornbread, so I experimented with the sweet cornbread recipe I found online. It actually turned out pretty good! I just wish I had put a little more sugar in it lol.

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Sweet cornbread recipe:

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup yellow cornmeal

⅔ cup white sugar

1 teaspoon salt

3 ½ teaspoons baking powder

1 egg

1 cup milk

⅓ cup vegetable oil

Directions
Step 1
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Spray or lightly grease a 9 inch round cake pan.

Step 2
In a large bowl, combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, salt and baking powder. Stir in egg, milk and vegetable oil until well combined. Pour batter into prepared pan.

Step 3
Bake in preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean.

I forgot to take a pic of the finished product, but it was sooo good! I’m definitely going to make it again in the future.

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We had cappy tag along with us then made our way to see Jocelyn and her family. Of course, my mom wasn’t even halfway done with dinner, so I ended up having to help her out facepalm. She wanted me to grate the cheese like I used to when I was a kid lol. I was really not keen on staying long due to covid concerns, but we ended up staying around 2 hours. My sister had breakfast leftover, so I had a few pieces of bacon, blueberry muffins and sausage links. The roast was pretty much ready, but the last thing my mom needed to do was put the mac and cheese in the oven. I told her that we could just take it home and finish baking it ourselves LOL. She ended up making two pans for us.

Those pans lasted us nearly a week LOL.

After about 30 minutes in the oven, the mac and cheese were ready to go!

My mom knew that I love roast. What she didn’t know was that Jasmine loves roast almost as much as I do! In fact, that roast barely made it through dinner LOL. I told my mom that she would have to make a roast for me and a roast for Jasmine :-p.

We didn’t do anything else the rest of the evening except relax zzz.

Congratulations on your new position!! I really enjoyed reading this entry because I’ve been curious what package delivery was like during the pandemic and how it has changed.

Did y’all have to hire more drivers??

We did. Let me give you some background on how fedex works in the terminal. Every morning, preload starts anywhere from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. and ends right around 8ish. Every loader is assigned anywhere from 3-4 trucks on a vanline, and their main responsibility is to make sure every package is loaded in the correct section in the correct truck. We also have loaders who unload the trailers unto the conveyor belts that take them down the chutes to the various van lines. There are packages called incompatibles (ICs) that aren’t able to go on conveyers, so we have loaders who transport the ICs to all the van lines.

When the pandemic hit, all the loaders were given an option whether to continue working or take approved time off. That severely affected our day-to-day operation. It took preload longer to get everything off the trailers and into the trucks, and it caused our terminal to fall behind schedule. In fact, it got so bad, fedex had to rely on outside resources to help manage all the chaos. I saw piles of food packages, i.e. Blue Apron, Misfit Market, etc. just sitting out in the open with nowhere to go. Those packages would spoil causing an odor you couldn’t ignore. We had trailers of packages just sitting in the yard with no indicator as to how long it would be before those packages were even touched. It wasn’t just our terminal though. UPS was going through the same thing, so the late spring-summer months were HORRIBLE. There was a point where we were behind 50-that’s FIVE-O-trailers. Customers were trying their hardest to come up to the terminal and try to get their packages that way, but that wasn’t happening.

It was just an awful mess, so we had to hire more drivers. The tricky part about fedex in general is that you have to constantly hire because you never know what’s going to happen. People fail drug tests; people walk out; people feel that they shouldn’t be working in the middle of a pandemic, etc. My boss also went on a hiring blitz to prepare for the upcoming peak season. He wanted to get as many people as possible in the door in order to keep up with demand.

President Trump visited CDC around March 6th, then I started hearing rumors that Emory was going to extend Spring Break “indefinitely”. It was right around this time that GA was going under lockdown and only essential personnel would be allowed to travel. The caveat is that you could only travel to and from work or to fulfill an essential household need. We were all given a copy of an authorization letter to give to law enforcement in the event we were pulled over.

We had to keep this letter displayed at all times on our dash. It seriously felt weird during that month trying to figure out what was what. I have to admit, that looking back, it really wasn’t as bad as I was thinking. In my mind, I was imagining checkpoints set up all over the place like in the movies lol. Luckily, I didn’t encounter a single office during that time period before governor kemp lifted the lockdown.

That about does it for the time being. I’ll keep working on answering questions soon :-)

Last updated February 04, 2021