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Local UPS drivers banded together to deliver something special to a colleague who will spend his Christmas recovering from COVID-19 in the hospital.

Jackson Randall, a local driver for the United Postal Service and a U.S. Army veteran, is on the mend at the Quillen Rehabilitation Hospital, where he will remain throughout the holiday season.

UPS driver and @USArmy veteran Jackson Randall has been battling Covid for months and is on the mend in a rehab facility. His fellow @UPS drivers decided to give him a parade to wish him well in recovery. Good things are happening. Merry Christmas! @WJHL11 @ABCTriCities pic.twitter.com/7o5qhVSPOB

— Ted Overbay (@overbay_ted) December 23, 2021

His wife along with fellow UPS drivers organized a parade on Thursday to bring the holiday cheer to Randall, driving through the parking lot with words of encouragement and Christmas cheer.

A local UPS driver is being credited by his company with calling in a report of smoke at a Mt. Vernon home that helped prevent a small fire inside from becoming a more serious blaze.

Nathan Allen, 40, of Augusta was making a delivery Monday at a Belgrade Road residence when he smelled “something electrical” burning from the garage and noticed a light haze of smoke. And it appeared no one was home.

Allen, who has been working for UPS for the past seven months, said he could tell the difference between a woodstove smoke smell and that of the more electrical, plasticky kind he was detecting.

Louisville, Kentucky — which was a major delivery hub for U.S. carriers even before the COVID-19 pandemic turbo-charged online shopping — is suffering a severe labor shortage, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday (Dec. 22).

The Louisville/Jefferson County unemployment rate for October, the latest month for which U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data is available, was 3.2%, down from 5.0% a year earlier.

According to federal data cited by the WSJ, the Louisville area lost 93,000 jobs during the pandemic and has regained most of them, bringing the current level to 634,000 jobs.

A big factor in the region’s jobs recovery has been hiring at United Parcel Service (UPS) Inc.’s giant Worldport. Per the WSJ, the company employs more than 25,000 people in the region — about the same as before the pandemic, but they’re working more hours than pre-pandemic.

An Alva homeowner caught a delivery driver on his surveillance camera dropping off his packages and then peeing in front of his garage.

“The UPS driver who was dropping off Amazon and Target packages decided he had to relieve himself in front of the garage,” said Jarrod Kilway, the homeowner.

GIVEN that the global supply chain crisis is not expected to end anytime soon, integrated logistics provider UPS is continuously working to ensure that its customers do not face any backlog in shipments.

The crisis is caused by a surge in demand following the decline in Covid-19 cases, coupled with a supply shortage due to factory closures, a lack of key components and raw materials, as well as congestion in ports. This has resulted in delays in deliveries and empty supermarket shelves. With the peak holiday season already upon us, the backlog could worsen.

“We understand that the current situation with global supply chains is a concern for our customers and, as we expect the current supply and demand imbalance will continue into 2022, we’ll continue to collaborate with our largest customers, SMEs and end customers to manage network capacity for successful deliveries,” Matthew Parkey, UPS’s South Asia Pacific president, tells The Edge in an email interview.