I've been working for the United States Post office for nearly two years now. Am I a regular carrier? No. When I was first looking for a position, no regular mail carrier positions were open or given to me, so the position I took was working only on Sundays and holidays. I had taken this job in hopes that I could dip my foot into the post office and they'd soon have me switch positions to like a clerk or a regular carrier when the time arose.
But oh boy... oh boy... I learned quickly how much of your life you have to give up in order to work at the post office.
These guys, both city and rural carriers, practically have to come in all week and work on hours that fluctuate between 8 to even 10 or more hours just to get every piece of mail out and delivered. Think about it, working practically 70 hours a week - most carriers don't come in on Sundays but a lot of them do to make a quick buck. And it's not just for one city for us, since my office is a hub, we deliver mail to 2 other cities about 20 minutes away from ours. And on Sundays, we deliver to 2 more cities, making that a grand total of 6 cities to deliver to.
This isn't so bad so far yeah? Could be worse? Yes. Yes it can be worse.
Some people like to call in regularly during the week and this is where things can get effed up. There are not enough subs or regular carriers to cover all routes so a lot of them have to do two routes in a day. Delivering mail and packages. In crappy tin can LLV mail trucks that are basically ticking time bombs that are just waiting to give out.
Now that I'm on the subject of trucks, MAN do we really need new trucks to drive. The trucks that we use have been with the office since the 80s. These things are literally fire hazards with how many wires are exposed, how there's only a little fan to act as "a/c" for the truck, and literally so many places you could cut yourself and undoubtedly get an infected wound from it.
Yes there's new trucks on the way, but we won't be getting those until 2028. And even then who KNOWS if we will get ANY.
Digressing a little to tell a story. This happened last week. One of the carriers was delivering packages to a city about a half an hour away from us (which I will get to in a second.) As he practically just started his route, the truck's engine caught on FIRE. Literally within the next few seconds the whole thing was engulfed in flames. Nobody knows really how it started, but one thing's for sure, none of the packages inside survived. The guy frantically pulled out as many as he could before the truck got consumed by the flames - he's ok though, if not a bit shaken... he was also a new guy I think.
But you get the picture. Literally ANY of these trucks can catch on fire and melt the metal of the truck. This isn't a picture of his truck, but it looked just like this:
Yeah you wouldn't want to drive this piece of junk would you? My post office desperately needs an update. We still have to manually write in our times on a green card, the trucks are death traps, and we still use dial up for internet... I'm not joking, the post office STILL uses dial up internet
Anyways, Sunday deliveries. These days are basically Amazon backlog. We come in in the mornings, take our pick of the routes, sort and number them, load them into the truck, and be on our way. The route I usually take is about 100 or more stops. ("Stops" are individual addresses that I stop at to deliver packages) And it could be even more, up to 130 stops some days, 90 stops other days. And packages can stack up to 140 or more. And most days I have to take this by myself. We are staffed just up to enough to cover every other route, which can have up to 70 stops or less than that. So yeah, the route I take is a monster.
I was trained to drive a van with a bigger interior (and actual a/c thank god) so I'm usually the one to take the monster route. My supervisors know how terrible of a route it is and have tried to request changing up the routes to alleviate some of the stress, but, of course, nothing has been changed so far - it's been months since this was brought up.
So I mentioned that we deliver to up to 6 cities for Sundays, I'll name those cities: A, P, F, Al, C, and L. We deliver Amazon packages to these cities because they don't have any amazon facilities stationed nearby to deliver to them. F, C, and L are cities we regularly carry mail to since they're closer by, so it's no big deal and understandable that we deliver to them. And A is our own city. P and Al are further away, but they send their own carriers to handle their own packages.
P is pretty good at sending enough carriers to deliver their packages, and I'm honestly jealous at how small their routes are. However, the P carriers absolutely do not care to help out our other routes. They help each other out, get done with their routes, and leave, while the rest of us have to stay out later and help out with our own crappy routes.
Al is the worst one as of yet. Both of their routes are about 114 stops each, and it's only 2 routes they have to deliver to. The SMART thing they would do is send 4 people, 2 people each to handle both routes and split them so that they can easily deliver packages without having to worry about stay out later. Want to know how many people Al usually sends to handle these routes? 2 people, and on most days, only 1. This means we have to pull from our own ranks and send them to help split their own routes. Which means we lose out on help from our own routes.
So, let me summarize this. Al cannot give two shits on sending more people to handle their OWN routes, which means carriers from A have to help them pick up the pace on a city THEY DON'T KNOW, and P carries throw out any lick of sympathy they have and leave before they even get the THOUGHT of helping other struggling carriers. People really do like to talk shit about each other in the post office, it's just very toxic.
All this, and I'm going to put the blame on one conglomerate of people... Upper Management. I understand things take time to change, but this place literally had the beginning of the 21st century to change and yet nothing's come of it except for Amazon coming in and providing more time for carriers to work. The resources at our disposal have not been updated in years, even decades. They don't do anything to alleviate stress from carriers, and not even proper training for newer carriers. You are thrown to the wolves most likely. Without so much as a shadow day even. You really have to want to work at the post office if you want to make a career out of this place, because you will not have enough time to even breathe almost every day of the week.
I'm saying all of this because I'm going to quit soon enough and I just want people to know the awful experience I've had so far. On the bright side, the people that work at the post office, most of them are really nice and helpful. They understand how bad the job is and like to have a laugh about it all. But this place has affected me mentally and physically, scaring me away from trying my hand at any other position provided by the facility.
I made the mistake of thinking I could handle whatever the post office threw at me and I feel mentally crippled because of it. (And I only work one day y'all, I shouldn't be feeling like this) Not to say that you shouldn't work at the post office if you really want to, but I feel like people need to know what to expect when you consider taking a job from here.
If you live on your own, are on call every day, or need lots of hours and love to work all day, this job is probably for you. But I just can't recommend any position since I cannot see myself working every day in such poor conditions. I wish I could, but my body was not made for it.
So I'll be quitting soon enough. It was nice to have the experience, wish I could've had the courage to step up to a carrier position. But taking all of these things into account.
No thanks. I need a break.
Oh, a P.S. here or whatever, Christmas time is a shit show. Nobody should have to work that long every day. In the freezing cold.
Be respectful of your carriers, friends. They do so much work. Thank you for reading this, cause man... I needed to get that all out.
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