Driving down endless winding roads whilst carrying out your courier work can get rather tiresome and monotonous. But what if you were delivering parcels across the galaxy, like courier worker Fry in the TV series ‘Futurama’?
Futurama depicts the story of Fry, a former pizza delivery boy, who is cryogenically frozen at the start of the year 2000 and thawed out in 2999. Being a pizza delivery boy, Fry already has some experience in carrying out courier work and this equips him for his next job as a cargo delivery boy for Planet Express, a company owned by his only living relative, Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth.
The self-proclaimed intergalactic courier company was started by the Professor in order to fund his research. Although the company scrapes by it is always in fierce competition with Moms Friendly Delivery Company, a cornerstone of MomCorp, which although appears to be owned by a sweet, frail old lady is in actual fact owned by a manipulative director, who will stop at no means to make her company succeed. So ruthless are her business strategies that it’s a wonder that the friendly courier workers at Planet Express manage to survive at all, but this they do thanks to their complete disregard for health and safety laws and the minimum wage; the Professor has even be known to accept the occasional bribe. With a company slogan that reads ‘Our crew is expendable, your package isn’t’ you can’t help but feel that the crew of Planet Express would be better off working self-employed courier jobs.
The Professor may be the bane of the courier worker’s lives, yet despite many changes of owner throughout the series, the business always manages to fall back into his capable hands. Cubert and Dwight inherited the courier work business from the Professor during one fateful episode in which he was declared dead. During their management the company was renamed ‘Awesome Express’ and grew to be more even more profitable than Planet Express, until it emerged that the two boys were not carrying out any deliveries during their courier work, but rather depositing all the parcels on a crater on the moon.
Although Planet Express carries out courier work in every corner of the galaxy, the headquarters are based in New York City on the corner of West 57th Street and Henry Hudson Parkway. The building is one of Planet Express’s only three assets, which also include the famous green delivery ship and a servant robot, known simply as 1-X.
The Planet Express headquarters are built upon a green limestone cavern and contain five separate floors, with rooms consisting of the Professor’s laboratory, the main hangar, a kitchen, living room and even a room entitled ‘The Accusing Parlour’, which in used in one episode to solve a murder; not quite the typical courier office that you are most likely accustomed to then!
But whilst Futurama may provide viewers with an entertaining look at work in a courier company it also raises some questions about courier work in the future. After all how long can it be until we swap our trusted white vans for pea-green spaceships and start taking up self-employed courier jobs on the planet Zorg?
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