Introducing Shift Notes

Send me notes about work!

Yesterday I took part in the Poetry’s Project annual New Year’s Day marathon reading, a tradition now in its 52nd year. Performers of all kinds—mostly but decidedly not all poets—get two to three minutes to read whatever they want. It was great, though as one performer observed, watching people go long, it was fascinating to see what other people’s conception of three minutes entails.

Instead of reading my own work, I decided to solicit notes from a few of the city’s 65,000 app-based delivery workers. "Very Zohran’s New York’” as a friend said afterward, though this is really just what my own work entails, as a labor reporter. Los Deliveristas Unidos, the organization that fights for those workers, enthusiastically helped me pull off the idea, gathering and translating drivers’ responses. (The org is fresh off a legislative win and I encourage you to learn about them and/or donate.) From the deliveristas responses, I composed a poem of sorts.

The anecdote about late-night gum delivery cracked me up; I’ve been debating with friends for days whether that was a drug thing or a fetish thing on the customer's part. I love hearing the weird stuff like this about people’s jobs, and I can’t always do that when I’m writing about organizing campaigns or strikes.

That makes sense. That writing has a time-sensitive, instrumental purpose: exposing employer wrongdoing, informing the public about the conditions that led to a strike. Asking workers to digress risks trivializing their struggle, or disrespecting the risks they take in speaking with me at all.

So, I’m starting an experiment: Shift Notes. It’ll be a series I publish on this Substack. Consider last night’s reading the first installment. I’ve set up an email address for submissions: alexnatashapress@gmail.com. I want workers of every kind to send me whatever notes they want people to know about their jobs. What’s the worst smell in a slaughterhouse? How do you and your coworkers pass the time at Taco Bell? What do you learn about the world working at Sephora? What are the weirdest things customers do? What does the assembly line in your factory sound like??

Give me specificity and detail! Make me laugh, recoil in disgust, or weep over life’s beauty. Part literary project, part labor reporting, part sociological survey. Studs Terkel for the digital age.

This will only work if a lot of people send notes. They can be long or short, dashed-off bullet points, sentence fragments, or thoughts you’ve been turning over for years. Tell people whatever you want, however you want. I’ll compile these notes as I see fit—editor’s privilege—and publish them here. The ten funniest sentences workers emailed me this week. What Work Smells Like: A Survey. The single most annoying thing about being an Amazon delivery driver.

I will likely splice parts of submissions, as I did with the deliveristas responses—though without the constraint of a three-minute reading, I’ll have more freedom to publish full paragraphs or intact stories. (But please don’t send full essays; put those somewhere they won’t be cut up.) Anonymity is fine—I am not planning to include full names—but do tell me what kind of work you do, where in the world you do it, and anything else you want readers to know. Don’t use an email account connected to your job if you don’t want your boss to know what you wrote. Submitting more than once is encouraged.

I have no idea whether this call will get enough traction to work. So please share it. Encourage your friends, family, and coworkers to send something. Send something yourself. And please subscribe—I’m going to need paying subscribers if I’m going to put real time into this.

Thanks for reading and happy New Year.

P.S. Below is the full text of Shift Notes, installment #1. Thanks again to the deliveristas.

one time a customer asked me to leave food inside the trash can because no one would steal it there / I had to take clothes to be washed / delivering a single pack of chewing gum late at night to a house only two blocks away—the customer insisted on contactless delivery but kept giving confusing directions and when I finally arrived, they asked me to place it on a chair in the driveway

going up inside those tall buildings and seeing the whole city below / you can travel just a few blocks and the culture, pace, and atmosphere completely change

once I delivered food to a model in a photography studio; they asked me to be part of the photo shoot / one time somebody invited me to share the meal with him but I was on duty and I can’t be working and having a meal / once I delivered food during a heavy rainstorm and the customer came outside with an umbrella and offered me a hot drink / it’s strange being made to wait outside a restaurant in the cold

in 2026, I’d like the companies give back all the tips they’ve stolen / in 2026, I’d like the companies to remember that during the pandemic, we went out into the streets in fear to deliver everything people needed to their homes / in 2026, I’d like more respect and support for delivery workers

we are human beings, not machines / we have the right to work at least forty hours a week and not to be unfairly deactivated by corporate algorithms

we are not powerless / without us, these companies wouldn’t exist / ask their investors what they would do without us — would they deliver the food to customers themselves?