Joel Reyez is 49 years old. He has delivered packages for United Parcel Service (UPS) in Bakersfield, California, for 23 years. He often works 10-hour shifts. Like the rest of the company’s drivers, he works alone.
The back of his truck can feel like an oven. Nobody is riding along to notice if he starts to fade, so he has to catch it himself. “We’re industrial athletes,” he told the Journal.
The Routine
Start with lunch. Grease is out. His wife packs him a turkey sandwich with tomatoes, cucumber and lettuce, plus two pickles, which carry electrolytes from the sodium in the brine and traces of potassium. He rounds it out with fruit, and says watermelon is especially effective for hydration.
On water, the rule is about timing before it is about volume. It is not enough to drink once you are hot and thirsty, he says. You have to be hydrating well before that. “I’m always drinking water.” In hot weather he estimates he gets through up to 20 bottles a day, often with powder electrolytes stirred in, and he keeps Gatorade in the ice chest next to his seat.
This is one man’s routine for one job. Twenty bottles of water and a two-pickle sodium load are calibrated to somebody sweating through a 10-hour shift in a truck box. An afternoon in the garden is not that.
If you take a diuretic or a blood-pressure medicine, or you have been told to watch your sodium or potassium, your numbers are not his numbers. That is a conversation for your doctor, not for a newspaper and not for us.
The Journal’s own framing is a soft one: “Here’s how you, too, can navigate the heat like a veteran UPS driver.” The habits travel. The doses do not.
The Part He Didn’t Buy
UPS supplies the gear. Cooling hats, sleeves and towels, which he dips into that ice chest through the day. The sleeves keep him cool for up to two hours, and wrapping the towel around his neck gives a burst of extra relief. The company says it supplies more than 15 million pounds of ice to its facilities each summer, has given staff more than 100,000 water jugs, and has installed 3,000 ice machines and 2,000 water fountains.
But the change he singles out is not gear at all. Every new delivery vehicle UPS buys now comes with air conditioning, a provision in the company’s most recent contract with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union that represents its drivers. Reyez got his first air-conditioned truck this year. After so many years without it, he says he is surprised how much even a few minutes at a time keeps the fatigue away. “The AC changed the trajectory of the game,” he says. It did not replace the rest of it. He still runs the fans, dips the sleeves and packs the ice chest.
Nothing here needs a portfolio to be useful. Drink before you are thirsty, eat light when it is hot, and get out of the sun in bursts rather than waiting to be rescued from it. A man with 23 Bakersfield summers behind him is a better authority on that than any adviser is, and our households live in the same valley he drives. If there is a second thought worth keeping, it is ours rather than the Journal’s: the improvement Reyez names first did not come out of a catalog. It came out of a contract. That is worth remembering the next time you are tempted to price what you own at zero just because you did not buy it.
No portfolio angle, and we are not going to invent one. Send this because it is useful: our clients live in the same valley Joel Reyez drives, and he has better heat advice than we do. One editorial note, ours and not the Journal’s — the change he singles out, air conditioning in every new truck, arrived as a bargained contract term. Note what that does not say: the article does not claim the AC fixed his job. He still relies on the sleeves, the towels, the fans, the ice chest and the food, and much of that gear UPS supplies voluntarily. The narrow, honest version is that a term attached to a job can matter as much as anything on a shelf. That framing is worth carrying into a pension review, where households routinely discount the benefits they already hold to zero. It reappears in this week’s Connected Read.
UPS
Mentioned for context only. A mention is not a recommendation — see the portfolios page for what the books actually hold.