I’m currently unemployed, which means that all the time I spend working on stuff for all my unpaid jobs is now spent at home. Usually, my work environment includes some combination of two to three cats, a laptop, and a bed/futon. This working environment can become very unstable if anything disrupts the cats. A disruption of sufficient scale can lead to up to an hour of renegotiating our positions in the room.
I have discovered that nothing disrupts the peace and quite like a delivery truck. The cats take note of any noises in the area, but they usually just twitch their ears and wait for the sound to end; this is their reaction to cars, sirens, trains, lawn care equipment, etc. The one exception is delivery trucks, FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. As soon at a truck enters the 300 block of my street, the cats are on high alert. They stop whatever they were doing and run to a window to monitor the situation. If the back door is open, they are out there in a flash to sit motionless until the truck vacates the area.
I live in a complex at the end of a dead end street, so every truck that passes the last intersection before the dead end, drives through my apartment complex to turn around. Between FedEx and UPS, I go through this at least twice a day. While the cats have the same reaction to delivery trucks, regardless of their corporate affiliation, the FedEx truck is by far the most annoying. At some point in the company’s history, they hired a bunch of engineers to determine the most efficient way to deliver packages. One of their findings was that drivers should leave the truck running almost all the time. They leave the truck on while they deliver a package. They leave the truck on while they prepare for their next delivery. They even leave the truck running while they park behind my apartment and upload the delivery data for their recent deliveries. As far as I can tell, the cats think a parked, running, delivery truck is a national security threat.
I like getting packages as much as anyone else, I just don’t want my day disrupted by anyone in my neighborhood getting a package.