BrownCafe

The UPS driver who struck and seriously injured a female pedestrian in Evanston Monday evening has been taken off the road pending the outcome of an internal company investigation, a UPS spokeswoman said Tuesday.

UPS spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg said the driver has been pulled off the road pending the outcome of the internal probe into the crash.

“Police released the packages in the vehicle,” she said. “We were able to complete the deliveries for that route. Another driver is on that route, and we (are providing service) in the area (Tuesday).”

At about 12:50 a.m. a 38-year-old man was backing a tractor up to a trailer at the UPS Customer Center on Northern Boulevard in DeWitt, Sgt. Chase Bilodeau said.

While backing up, the driver accidentally pinned a 37-year-old man in the abdomen between the tractor and the trailer, Bilodeau said. Police and Rural Metro ambulance responded to the scene.

For days before it began, I dreamed uneasily of a host of things that could go wrong in my new career as a UPS delivery man: dropping a package and breaking something, getting crushed under a toppling stack of big-screen TVs in the back of the truck, being mobbed by women overcome at the sight of that legendarily sexy brown uniform.

Yet my first big screw-up was something that never occurred to me: Handing a customer the electronic tablet to sign for his delivery, I somehow got it backward, so he was looking at it upside down. Then I fumbled it as I tried to turn it right side up, nearly dropping the (no doubt delicate as well as insanely expensive) device to the concrete floor of a loading dock.