What can brown do for me?

Cause me anxiety, apparently.

(Before I begin, let me say that we have a dear friend who works for UPS. And while I have no doubt that he is a valuable employee, not to mention a valuable breadwinner for his family, that will not stop me from poking fun at his employer. He doesn't read my blog, anyway. Ha! Ha!)

Back 18 or so months ago, when I first started running, I was convinced that the UPS mafia was after me. (So much so that I wondered what I had done to get on the bad side of the aforementioned friend.) It didn't matter what street I ran down; before I could turn a corner, there would be a UPS truck coming toward me. At first I thought the driver was working at warp speed, until I realised there were at least two trucks delivering in the neighbourhood. I started to wonder if they got tired of seeing me over and over again.

More recently, the big brown trucks delivering after I leave work seem to be playing how-close-can-we-get-to-the-cyclist-without-hitting-her. Seriously, they are making me nervous. I imagine it is not intentional (Ha! the mafia are after me again), but it freaks me out. Even with my helmet on, I'm pretty sure that I would not come out well in a fight between a UPS truck and my bicycle.

Well, UPS made a delivery to our house on Thursday evening. I knew they were coming, because I had followed the tracking link from the e-receipt of something I had ordered. And the UPS website has some polite fiction at the top about deliveries being made between 9 AM and 7 PM, which meant that by 7:30 I was muttering dire things about how the tightest ship in the shipping business seemed to have sprung a leak or two.

Well, by 8 PM the nice man in the brown uniform had turned up with my tea and chocolates. And I took back all the nasty things I had said. But that won't stop me from asking our pal about why his coworkers want to kill me.