When I first started working at the mail, almost 8 years ago, I had no real direction in life. I had just finished my business economics degree and although those two years were a lot of fun (I mainly played Hearthstone in class instead of paying attention) I had only learned one thing throughout the entire duration. That one thing was the fact that I did not want to work in business economics. I’ve talked about unpaid internships before but the most egregious one I’ve ever gone through was the one I did during that degree. I spent two years working at a small company, being miserable most of the time, without getting paid for it. That kind of killed any and all interest I ever had in working in economics. So instead I decided to rethink my life choices and deliver some mail while I did so. It was never my intention to work there for much longer than maybe a year. So what went wrong?
I suppose it’s better to ask what went right, because a lot of things did go right. But it didn’t start out amazing. I remember the first few weeks as being awful. You see, no one quite prepared me for how big a part of delivering mail hinges on efficiency and experience. I’ll never tell anyone that delivering the mail is a difficult job. Anyone can do it, it’s just putting the right letter in the right mailbox. But what you need to know is that there is a lot of value in knowing your motions. How to hold your mail, how to sort your different bundles of mail and most importantly, knowing your route and knowing exactly where each address is. It turns out that learning all of this can take a few months. I still remember vividly that the first time I did the route that I’ve consistently walked throughout all eight years I took forever. Seriously, it’s about a two hour route (less nowadays with the lower volume in mail compared to eight years ago), and it took me almost four and a half hours. I remember going home almost in tears thinking I wasn’t cut out for this job after all. I’m glad I kept going at it though because once the basics became second nature, this job became much more enjoyable.
There’s a lot of things to like, after all. Walking outdoors gets you some physical activity, sunlight and fresh air. It’s pretty great to contrast the sitting at a desk playing games and writing. Obviously the weather isn’t always great but it’s rare for weather to be so bad that it’s actually a problem. A bit of rain or a bit of cold/heat is easy enough to deal with if you prepare. Sometimes the smell of fresh rain is even pleasant. And to top it all off, I get to put on my headphones and listen to podcasts and music. Throughout my job as a mailman I must have listened to thousands of hours of podcasts and almost an equal amount of music. It’s great to rest your mind and not feel stressed. Most of your coworkers are going to be nice too, at least in my experience. I’m not a very social person, but I regularly have a chat with different coworkers when our routes intersect. But not everything about working at the mail is great.
So let’s dive into the things that went wrong. There’s a few. The first one, and arguably the biggest issue I’ve had, is that of the planning department. We had a lovely woman who did administration for the first few years I worked at the mail and I never had any issues with her. She knew what was reasonable to ask of people and she was familiar enough with the daily workload of mail delivery that she would never ask anything outrageous. Unfortunately she quit two years or so ago and we got a replacement. And then another replacement, and then another. Now I don’t want to be mean to these people, I’m sure it wasn’t an easy job to do, seeing how high the turnover on new people was, but they didn’t do a good job at all. They would see that you already walked three routes and then call you up to do a fourth. They would call you on your days off and ask if you still wanted to work regularly. They would even change your weekly schedule every single week and ignore any pre-existing agreements you might have. I didn’t want to work more than 3 hours in a day, except on Saturdays, as long as I got my three specific routes on Saturday. Those took around 4 hours but I liked those routes so that was fine with me. They took that as “on Saturday we can throw whatever in the schedule because Nick can work more that day.” The amount of times I’ve had to reject my schedule and then have a phone call about why I’ve still not changed my mind on this issue has been jarring. And then you’d make clear rules and agreements and then four weeks later there would be a new person with blatant disregard for my own schedule. Even if I didn’t get a different job, I don’t think I would have kept working here much longer with the changes that have been coming through.
And that also is indicative of the bigger issue the mail seems to be facing right now. There’s less and less new employees while old employees keep leaving. Only in the last two months before I quit, I think there were three other people that stopped working. I think it’s a combination of a few things. For starters, the wage is abysmal. I’ve worked here for 8 years and I’ve never earned more than minimum wage. Since you can’t work full days at the mail because we only start at 11 and aren’t technically supposed to deliver after 5 pm, it’s straight up impossible to make a decent wage at the mail. So the only people you’ll attract in the first place are pensioners, people who already have a partner with their main income and young people who need some extra cash. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these groups of people, but they’re unreliable in the sense that they’re not dependent on this job and are more likely to quit when things get annoying. The constant issues with planning, accompanied by new rules and changes that probably save the company money overall but make our job more annoying isn’t helping. We’ve started hiring people from further away and people who don’t speak Dutch. (that’s no knock on these folk, they all seem nice, but communication is just going to be slower, that’s a simple fact). I have no issue with that, but if you lose out all the people who know how things run, then it gets harder and harder for the new folk to get used to the job.
What I’m trying to say with this long rant is that capitalism and the drive for higher profits is destroying what used to be a respected job. Nowadays it doesn’t pay, gets more and more annoying to do and the upper brass gives zero fucks about the people doing the actual work. It’s actually kind of sad. It’s a good thing that my next job is one where people get the respect they deserve. That’s right, it’s in education.
Wait, what do you mean, educators don’t really get respect these days? Did I mess up again?
All jokes aside, I’ll miss this job. I really liked the good aspects and I’ll probably walk the long way around to and from the supermarket in the future in the hopes of coming across an old coworker and catching up. Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 