Last week, Styles caught you up on the underground trend of slutty Halloween costumes. This week, Bradley Melekian point us to the latest urban object of desire: men in uniform, specifically, delivery men in shorts.

Ask most women what a modern-day sex symbol looks like, and you are likely to be greeted with a description not of a brooding movie star, but a smiling cleanshaven man with a toned muscular frame, a brown uniform shirt and a year-round dedication to wearing shorts.

Ah yes, what women has not daydreamed about being swept off her feet, thrown in the back of a delivery van and then, you know, signing for a package. Fantasies about what brown can do for you is prevalent in popular culture - why, just five years ago, there was that episode of Sex and the City where Samantha got it on with the delivery boy.

This is all by design, of course - couriers encourage their drivers to stay in shape and offer incentives for working out, though they insist it's for productivity and injury prevention.

What really completes this piece, though, is the sidebar item showing the U.P.S.-recommended stretches. If we didn't know any better, we'd think the Times was trying to turn us on.

'Industrial Athletes': Men With the Goods [NYT]