Last week I photographed inside the FedEx Express Hub in Indianapolis for a weekend story in The Wall Street Journal about the booming U.S. economy. I left my house at 1:17 a.m. and arrived at the massive facility at the Indianapolis International Airport just before 2:30 a.m. I’ve been in a lot of factories over the years, but I had never seen anything like this. The subject for the story, James Wilson, is a material handler who uses a forklift to pack pallets of overnight packages into aluminum shipping containers to be loaded onto airplanes. Wilson’s work area is a ballet of forklifts playing three-dimensional Tetris. It kept me on my toes. I had my head on a swivel to make sure I wasn’t walking into the path of a forklift or getting in the way of the other workers. It was incredible to get a glimpse of the intricate process that goes on while most of us are asleep.
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