Todd

“When you order something from Amazon, the "one click" is the trigger at the beginning of a long global chain. And at the end of that click is the last mile. That "one click" queries cloud-based microservices for inventory and finds the closest fulfillment center. Robots pull the items off a shelf. The parcel zooms down miles of conveyor belts. Humans load it into trucks as palletized loads. Computers then coordinate the trucks, or the blue Amazon 737s turning and burning on the runway. Off to a regional fulfillment center, out to the USPS P&DC, down to the local post office, because all of Amazon's market and computing power comes to grief at the last mile. Those clicks are ultimately handles by old women who curse your nighest name and pray for your death, women who drove three hours to sort your stuff into wire cages and from those cages into the back of my 2012 Tacoma truck. It was good that we lived in this world when the pandemic came, or else millions more would have died around the globe. I am proud to have been part of this big system that helped us survive.

But I also cursed your name. Was curbside pickup too much to ask for your chest-of-drawers-sized deliveries of Variety Pack Quaker Instant Oatmeal? Was forgoing your Gatorade Brand Kiwi Strawberry Propel Zero Calorie Water with Electrolytes and Vitamins C & E too big a sacrifice?”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“We had always been friendly but just ran in different circles. But we get older, and any connection to the past becomes charged with nostalgia. These witnesses to our younger selves tell us that it wasn't all some hallucination, that our younger bodies once walked the earth.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning,” he wrote, “and it is best not to worry about either.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“The real distinction is between work and service, and I think it's one of the great dividing lines in American life. I wonder if part of how we've become so atomized is that while we all work, few of us serve. It is service that gives life meaning, and it is service to our community and our nation that gives the ideas of "community" and "nation" meaning as well.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home