I trained the new guy. He was an app.
For thirty-two years, I drove the same delivery route through the heart of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Back in the ’70s, when I started, the truck was a beat-up Ford with a stick shift that groaned like my old man after a double shift at the steel mill.
My hands knew every curve of those roads, every pothole on Maple Street, every shortcut through the Amish farms where kids in straw hats waved from hay wagons.
I delivered packages to folks who knew my name—Ed, the guy with the coffee-stained thermos and a story for every porch.
Each box I carried held a piece of their lives: a crib for a new baby, a record player for a teenager’s birthday, a toolbox for a carpenter starting over after the mill closed.
Back then, a delivery wasn’t just a drop-off. It was a handshake, a “How’s your mom doing?” or a quick laugh about the Phillies blowing another lead.
The world was different in those days. Main Street bustled with hardware stores, diners, and a five-and-dime where you could buy a Coke for a quarter.
Families sat on porches after supper, fireflies blinking in the dusk, while radios crackled with Johnny Cash or the evening news.
I’d park my truck at the end of my shift, wipe the sweat from my brow, and feel the quiet pride of a day’s work done right. My route wasn’t just a job—it was my place in the world, my proof I mattered to this town.
But time moves like a freight train, doesn’t it? By the ’90s, the five-and-dime was gone, replaced by a chain pharmacy with fluorescent lights that made your eyes ache. The diner where I used to grab a burger became a parking lot for a strip mall.
Folks stopped sitting on porches; they were too busy staring at screens—first TVs, then computers, then those damn phones. I didn’t mind much at first. I still had my route, my truck, my people.
Mrs. Callahan still waited for her monthly knitting supplies, always slipping me a homemade oatmeal cookie.
Mr. Jensen, the Korean War vet, still wanted his packages left by the back door so he could tell me about Incheon without his wife overhearing. I carried their stories as much as their boxes.
Then came the 2000s, and the world got faster. The company started tracking us with GPS, like we were convicts on parole.
They cut our lunch breaks, pushed us to deliver more packages in less time. “Efficiency,” they called it. I called it a kick in the teeth. But I adapted. I learned their new systems, punched in their codes, and kept my route running smooth.
I was fifty-five, my knees creaking like the old truck’s suspension, but I wasn’t ready to quit. This was my life. My daughter, Sarah, was in college, studying to be a nurse, and every package I delivered paid for her books, her future.
I’d come home to my wife, Ellen, with her meatloaf on the table, and we’d talk about the day when we’d retire to a little cabin by the Susquehanna, fishing and forgetting the world.
Then they brought in the drones. The robots. The apps.
It started small. A memo about “automation trials.” A new kid at the depot showing us a tablet app that tracked packages better than I ever could. I didn’t think much of it—technology was just a tool, right?
But then I saw it: a sleek, buzzing drone dropping a package on Mrs. Callahan’s lawn. No knock, no smile, no cookie. Just a cold thud and a notification on her phone. The company called it progress. I called it a gut punch.
Last year, they sat me down in a sterile office that smelled like cheap air freshener. The manager, a kid half my age with a degree and no calluses, told me my route was being “optimized.”
They were replacing my truck with a fleet of drones and self-driving vans. “You can train the new system, Ed,” he said, like it was a favor. “You’ve got experience.” So I did. I trained the app.
I showed it my shortcuts, my tricks for navigating snowstorms, the houses with dogs that’d chew your leg off if you didn’t toss a biscuit first. I poured thirty-two years of know-how into a machine that didn’t care.
And when I was done, they handed me a severance check and a pat on the back. “Thanks for your service,” they said, like I was some soldier discharged from a war nobody remembered.
I’m sixty-two now, too young to retire, too old to start over. The depot’s gone—turned into a distribution hub for machines that don’t need coffee breaks or health insurance.
I walk the streets of my old route sometimes, past the porches where I used to stop. Mrs. Callahan’s gone; her house is a rental now, with packages piling up on the doorstep, delivered by drones that don’t know her name.
Mr. Jensen passed last winter, and nobody told me until I saw the obituary taped to a barbershop window. The town’s quieter now, the heart of it hollowed out by big-box stores and online orders. The kids don’t wave anymore; they’re too busy staring at screens.
I tried to keep busy. Took a job at the hardware store, but it’s not the same. The customers don’t know me, and I don’t know them. I’m just a guy in an apron, pointing them to aisle five.
Ellen says I should be proud of what I did, that I raised a family, put Sarah through school, kept this town moving for three decades. But pride’s a hard thing to hold onto when the world tells you you’re obsolete.
Sarah calls from Philly, talking about her hospital shifts, her new life. She’s got her mother’s heart and my stubborn streak, and I’m proud of her, but there’s a gap between us now. She lives in a world of apps and algorithms, and I’m still stuck in the days of stick shifts and porch swings.
The other night, I found my old thermos in the garage, the one I carried on my route. It was dented, rusted, but it still smelled faintly of Folgers.
I sat there, holding it, remembering the weight of a package in my hands, the crunch of gravel under my boots, the way Mrs. Callahan’s cookies tasted after a long day.
I thought about the America I grew up in, where a man’s work was his worth, where you could look your neighbor in the eye and know their story. That America’s fading, replaced by a colder, faster one that doesn’t have room for guys like me.
I don’t know what’s next. Maybe I’ll fish that river with Ellen, maybe I’ll find a way to matter again. But as I walk these streets, past the homes I used to serve, I can’t help but feel like I’m carrying one last package—one nobody asked for, one nobody needs.
It’s the weight of a life spent working, loving, hoping, only to be told you’re not fast enough, not smart enough, not new enough for the world you helped build.
And yet, as the sun sets over Lancaster’s fields, painting the sky the color of my old truck’s rust, I think of the folks I delivered to, the lives I touched, the stories I carried.
They’re still out there, in the cracks of this changing world, waiting for someone to remember. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it has to be.
