Postal Days, Part 1.

And no, I did not have the temptation to name this “Going Postal.”

When I was faltering as an undergrad, at one point my mother said maybe I should drop out of school and try to get a job at the Post Office, because it didn’t seem like school was really helping me with anything. I blanched at that advice, and did manage to graduate [basically a B average student—had no real motivation to do better and only really buckled down if a class interested me] but had no idea what to do after that. After several months of struggle, I enrolled in a paralegal program at a nearby university [also incurring my first student loan, but that’s beside the point.] I then attempted to find a job as a paralegal in different places but it looked like I was about to have still more months of struggle when I saw an ad in the paper for data entry jobs at the Post Office. Guess I could do worse, I thought. I can at least do this until I find something better. It’ll probably only be for a year or so…..

I stayed nearly seven years, working in different capacities. It was my first full-time job.

I worked at a Remote Encoding Center. We existed as a short term solution while technology was being developed. The letter sorting machines could read a lot of typewritten addresses but had trouble with handwritten letters and certain typewritten fonts. As the mail was ran through the machine, it was scanned and the images were sent to us. I’d see a picture of the letter on my screen, I would type some address information [using specialized abbreviations and special keys] and that would tell the machine where the letter was supposed to go.

Through most of my time there, I worked from 4 PM to 12:30 AM, and after a while I got weekends off. I was a “transitional employee” which meant I got a straight hourly wage with no benefits, and I got furloughed for a week every year. They always hired a ton of us transitional employees to gear up for the holidays. We got an ergonomic break every 55 minutes, alternating between 5 and 10 minutes.

In many ways, still the best job I ever had as far as schedule and being able to just work and not have to worry about other people’s problems. I could listen to music or whatever I wanted on my headphones. I listened to so many books on tape from the library, usually mysteries. The more literary stuff I read didn't seem to work on tape for whatever reason. During Christmas time we would work 12 hour days and I’d get off work at 4 AM sometimes. I’d listen to the BBC all night. The first Christmas I didn’t know if they would keep me on after the holiday so I tried to get all the hours I could. I worked 12 hours a day straight for 13 days. I fell asleep in my chair that Christmas when I was visiting my parents.

They did keep me and things were pretty good. I typed [they called it "keying"] quickly and was accurate most of the time. I was always afraid my hours would get cut, but they never did. We even had overtime. I had my week’s furlough but was told to return. I listened to a lot of punk rock CDs and NPR. A lot of the time if I really liked a song I'd put it on repeat. One night I played "From Her to Eternity" for an hour straight. The job had negative parts too, though. The work schedule meant I never could do anything in the evenings, since those were the peak hours for mail in the processing plant. I did get weekends off after a while which helped. Some of the supervisors were hard to deal with, and would make up rules just to show how much control they had over everyone. The job of supervisor wasn’t that demanding, they mainly just sat in the office and looked at the monitors letting them know about the images that were coming in, so there was plenty of time for them to mess with people.

That fall there was big news, the union [which most of us joined] had won a grievance and they were going to have to make several of the transitional employees “regulars,” that is, full time permanent postal employees. It would all be determined by our scores on the exam we took the year before. I kept waiting to see if the supervisor would ever call me into the office, and eventually he did. He was a big guy named Ray with a bouffant haircut and a temper that would get out of control sometimes, though he was good-natured most of the time. He asked if I wanted to be a regular, and I accepted, though it meant I was probably going to be at the Post Office longer than I originally planned...and also not always at this job.