Alright, you've phoned for your pick-up and the Vancouver call centre is busy and you've been bounced to Montreal, they've told you I'll be by at some ungodly hour, like 7 pm (1900h) or something, and now you're surprised when I show up at 4:30 pm, freaking out saying, "it's gotta go now!" Why you ask? Because this is Vancouver and the domestic plane originates here and flies east, so we're first into the sky, unlike Montreal. So now you've dumped off you're package and your part is done, whew! But what happens to your package?

Well, basically I want to leave downtown at 4:30pm cuz the first plane leaves at 6:10 pm (1810h.) So I barn cleverly(that's airforce talk for returning to the building or "barn." Most of the original pilots were airforce pilots,) without speeding may I add, to the airport on a Friday night rush hour in, ta-dah, about 23 minutes. I will pull into the building (you don't see, the photo shows about a third of the building) and off load the freight onto a power belt. That freight travels to the area of the belt shown in the picture as "A". If you have envelopes, they are sent off at the split to the area "B" where they are subjected to laser barcode reading and sorting (in FedEx that's a machine called Purple Lights) and bagged in an area called the "doc sort." Bags are colour coded (Memphis/Oakland/Various domestic) and consolidated and put back onto the belt. International bags and boxes are sorted into Airbus canisters (cans,) that's the area marked "C." Domestic bags and boxes carry on to another row of cans, similiar to "C." From there the cans get loaded onto the various cargo aircraft and go about their sky journey.

Voila. Day in, day out. About 7000 pieces in building, sorted, into the air in about 100 minutes.

UPDATE: Every once in a while I get the joy of dealing with the general public who's trying to set a new record for stupid, like this guy. This kinds stuff makes my head explode. Thanks for the note, dude.