Joel Reyez is 49 years old. He has delivered packages for UPS in Bakersfield for 23 years, often on 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 rides 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
Lunch goes light, because grease and heat are a bad team. His wife packs a turkey sandwich with tomatoes, cucumber and lettuce.
Plus two pickles. The brine carries electrolytes — the minerals your body loses when you sweat — mostly sodium, with traces of potassium.
He rounds it out with fruit and says watermelon is especially good for hydration. His pizza policy is firm: “Would I like a big old pizza? Yes. But in the heat, that’s just going to be bad for me.”
Water is about timing before it is about volume. Drinking once you are hot and thirsty is already late. “I’m always drinking water.”
On hot days he gets through up to 20 bottles, often with electrolyte powder stirred in, plus Gatorade in the ice chest next to his seat.
Bargained, Not Bought
UPS supplies the gear: cooling hats, sleeves and towels he dips in the ice chest all day. The sleeves keep him cool for up to two hours.
The company says it supplies more than 15 million pounds of ice to its facilities each summer, has handed out 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 UPS delivery vehicle now comes with air conditioning — a provision in the company’s latest contract with the Teamsters union.
Reyez got his first air-conditioned truck this year. “The AC changed the trajectory of the game,” he says. He still runs the fans, dips the sleeves and packs the chest.
The Fine Print
One caution before you copy the numbers. Twenty bottles and a two-pickle sodium load are calibrated to a man sweating through a 10-hour shift in a truck box. An afternoon in the garden is not that.
If you take a diuretic — a water pill — or a blood-pressure medicine, or you have been told to watch your sodium, your numbers are not his numbers. That is a conversation for your doctor.
The habits travel just fine, though. Drink before you are thirsty. Eat light when it is hot. Get out of the sun in bursts instead of waiting to be rescued from it.
Our clients live in the same valley Joel Reyez drives. A man with 23 Bakersfield summers behind him is a better authority on heat than any financial advisor.
But keep one financial thought from his story. The upgrade he values most came out of a contract, not a catalog.
A benefit attached to your job — a pension, health coverage, a bargained term — can be worth as much as anything you could buy. Stop pricing what you already own at zero.
That is a conversation worth having on purpose. Bring your benefits summary to your next review and we will count what the contract is actually worth.