Earlier this year, I’d vowed to get out of marketing.
After burning out on writing for university programs, being ghosted by clients who owed me money, and hearing a prospective new client say he was thinking of using AI instead of hiring a flesh-and-blood copywriter, I was more than ready to change careers.
So one day when I stopped by the local post office and saw a big banner that read, “We’re Hiring,” I thought, hey, why not?
Being a Rural Carrier Associate (RCA) didn’t sound half bad to me. I remember thinking how great it would be to spend my days working outside in the Florida sun, a warm breeze ruffling my hair as I delivered the mail from home to rural home. Just me and my truck on a scenic country road.
Too bad for me, it wasn’t like that at all.
Going postal
There is a saying among Postal Service employees:
“If you’re not postal, you don’t know.”
As in, you have absolutely no idea what your friendly, smiling mail carrier goes through every day to bring you your bills and birthday cards and all that shit you order online from Wal-Mart and Amazon.
No siree. To the average person, being a mail carrier looks like a cushy job. Why wouldn’t it be? You just sit on your ass all day, driving around and putting mail in boxes, right?
Wrong.
Let’s start with the trucks.
Did you know that in Florida, the inside of a mail truck can reach 115 degrees in August? There’s no air-conditioning in those bad boys, but with the help of an electric fan, you can get the temperature down to a sultry 105 if you try.
So, there is heat stroke to worry about.
Also dying in a fiery heap of twisted metal, because those goddamned trucks are death traps.
Most USPS mail trucks are well over 30 years old, and if you get one with working brakes and turn signals, you’re lucky. Most of the time, I couldn’t even tell what gear I was in because the gear shift gauge never matched the actual gear position.
Driving those trucks is something else.
Assuming you can get one to go above 50 miles an hour, the screeching and shuddering and grinding and clattering those trucks make as they edge closer and closer to disintegrating is enough to turn your hair white as you grapple the steering wheel in a sphincter-puckering death grip. Especially if there’s a line of impatient drivers riding your ass all the way to and from your delivery route, which of course there always is.
As bad as they were, however, the trucks were not my biggest problem. (Nor was it the low pay, the faulty technology, or even having to work every weekend and holiday.)
It was the delivery routes.
Driving me crazy
Rural Carrier Associates, being what the Postal Service calls “non-career employees,” do not get the best routes. Far from it. In fact, most RCAs can expect to work three to five years before they have a chance to become “career” employees and eligible for the best benefits, including their own regular routes.
Until then, an RCA will be assigned to any route that needs a carrier. The assignment changes daily. For example, when a “regular” carrier calls in sick, or wants time off. (At my station, we had at least two regular carriers who called in sick all the time — one of them, for about half of her shifts. I shit you not. But no worries, the union made sure she couldn’t be fired.)
RCAs also get stuck with all the shitty routes that none of the regular carriers want to do.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was one of these “orphan” routes that ultimately did me in.
Route 103, it was called. A dusty, ugly, confusing tangle of unpaved “roads” just north of town. You want rural? You’ll get a Mad Max-style apocalyptic wasteland littered with broken mailboxes, mailboxes without numbers, mailboxes with incorrect numbers, mailboxes hidden deep in thick foliage, and mailboxes located two blocks from the houses they belong to.
Below: Hey, aren’t these numbers supposed to match?
So incredibly surreal was this route that one of its roads, for all practical purposes, simply did not exist. I would eventually find it, after half an hour of frantic searching, at the end of a dead-end road. All of a sudden, there it was — just one house with one unreadable mailbox at one incongruous address seemingly pulled from thin air.
Of course, it didn’t help that Route 103, like virtually all orphan routes, lacked a coherent line of travel.
A line of travel is an official set of directions for navigating a mail delivery route. Printed on paper using advanced technology called a typewriter, it tells a carrier how to get to the route, which roads to turn on, the distance between turns, and how to get back to the station.
Without a good line of travel, a mail carrier is essentially screwed.
And since Route 103 was located in Bumfuck, Florida — comfortably outside the range of reliable GPS signals — I usually had no idea where I was going.
Well, except for that one fateful Sunday when the USPS GPS system took me so far off the beaten path that my truck got stuck deep in a sand dune in the pouring rain.
Deep in it
“Excuse me,” said the tow-truck driver when he finally arrived. (His own truck had gotten stuck twice while trying to reach me. Each time, he and his partner had had to attach a cable to a tree and pull the truck out using a winch.) “No offense, but what the fuck are you doing out here?”
“Following the GPS,” I muttered back.
“You know this isn’t a real road, right? It’s used as a pig path. I live close by and my buddies and I four-wheel out here on the weekends.”
Tow-Truck Guy went on to explain that he knew my supervisors at the post office and spoke to them often. “I pull mail carriers out of here all the time. I once pulled the same guy out of here five weeks in a row. I keep telling USPS to take this route off their GPS but they just won’t do it,” he said.
In my heart of hearts, I probably knew right then that it was over. But being the glutton for punishment that I am, I stayed on for another week and a half just to be sure.
Looking for a reason to stay
On one of those final days, I returned to the station as I usually did: filthy, sweaty, my shirt completely soaked through; twitchy, overheated, mildly traumatized, and frankly pissed off.
“Why the fuck am I doing this?” I raged as I pulled my mail trays and other supplies from the back of the truck. “Somebody please, tell me one redeeming quality of this job. Give me one good reason to keep doing this.” I pointed at my nearest colleague. “Why are you doing this?”
I received an assortment of sympathetic looks and sounds from my fellow RCAs, but sadly, no answers.
The only person who ever did give me an answer was one of my supervisors, a sweet and soft-spoken yet extremely strong woman with long locks of curly brown hair who told me the only reason she had kept on was because way back when she was a rural carrier, her own supervisor had told her she would never make it.
She’d taken that as a challenge and stayed with the job for really no other reason than to shove it straight up that woman’s ass.
I decided that as inspiring a story as that was, it just didn’t work for me.
I would be assigned Route 103 one more time, and when I got back — after a fraught afternoon spent lost, confused, frustrated, and bellowing to myself in the cab of my mail truck — I gave my notice.
Below: USPS GPS directions were often wildly inaccurate. Here, the USPS scanner (left) shows my destination as being 10.9 miles away, while Google Maps (right) correctly shows my destination as being just around the block.
So, what now?
Who knows. I still don’t want anything to do with marketing, and judging by the lack of job interviews and new clients I’ve been able to garner since quitting the post office, I may get my wish whether I like it or not.
(Incidentally, I found that working as a mail carrier has made me despise marketers and marketing even more. The sheer indefensible volume of worthless junk mail and bullshit dimensional chotchkies sent through the U.S. Postal Service is enough to make Iron Eyes Cody, that poor crying Indian in the 1970s “Keep America Beautiful” commercials, take out his tomahawk and start chopping off the heads and limbs of every fucking marketing person he can get his hands on.)
Ah, well. I gave it my best shot. I really had wanted that job to work out. But by my own estimation, only about 3 in 10 people who start with the U.S. Postal Service actually manage to stay with it, so I’m not going to beat myself up.
On a more positive note, I would like to salute the hard-working — if physically, mentally, and emotionally shattered — men and women who work so indescribably hard to bring us the mail. You people are fucking warriors, and despite the fact that I now have very good reasons to wonder what madness lies behind your warm smiles and friendly waves, I will never, ever doubt your strength and fortitude, and you have my respect forever.
Because for two brutal and bewildering months during the summer of 2023, I too had been postal, and holy shit, I know.
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I delivered mail for 35 years. Plenty of reasons to stay. Health care, retirement, security, decent pay, paid vacation, paid holidays, paid sick leave, TSP matching just to start with the benefits. Nothing is free, if you work you get the reward of early retirement. I retired at age 56 with full benefits.
Well done, Brad. Through hard work and no doubt a bit of luck (your luck HAD to have been better than mine!) — you’ve lived the dream that I could only dream of. Enjoy the rewards of early retirement and the satisfaction that comes from doing a difficult job well.
I have been in the Rural craft for 31 years. The Rural Carrier job of 31 years ago no longer exists. The USPS started to destroy the Rural craft in the mid-to-late 1990s and with RRECS they have finished it off.
It was a good job in 1992. In 2023 it has become excrement. I can’t speak about USPS jobs in the other crafts. They might be OK as far as I know. But if you’re looking for a job you don’t want to work as a Rural Carrier in 2023.
Don’t know about Rural Craft in the ‘90s, but I totally agree that RRECS has finished it off. Only the uninformed will be applying for RCA jobs now. We just had another short-termed RCA quit, and are back down to almost 50% or our routes without subs!
I worked in the clerk craft for 20 years, then quit to start my own business, got divorced and went back for job security and retirement. But, I didn’t want to start at the bottom as a clerk, so I became a city carrier. Same as an RCA, we got put on a different route each day. I made decent money and even though I had 20 years in that same PO, I figured I had a leg up on most because of familiarity with the craft, but I still had to pass my 90 day evaluation period as I’d been gone more than 3 years. Well, I cried nearly every day! I lost 20 lbs (that I didn’t need to lose) the first month! Then, I found out the supervisor that I had didn’t like me because I asked too many questions, taking too long on routes I’d never been on, etc. The postmaster took over my evaluations because he learned from supervisors that knew me that I had been an exceptional employee. I vowed that I was going to make my current supervisor glad he kept me! Eventually, I even went on the OT list (until I retired) to help out others and the supervisors. I retired after 12 more years and finally retired when I helped out on another route mid-January after doing my own route (dark, 30 mph wind and about 17 degrees). That made the decision easy! After retirement, I helped out on hwy contract routes (new boss) and guess who calls me one day to help out on a hwy contract route who was sick in his office??? Proud moment!!! I’m proud of myself for sticking to it, but to this day, it was the most difficult job I ever had.
Sounds like you paid your dues and have good reason to be proud. Congrats!
I loved this article! Thank you for putting into words the experience that so many of us have had! You really captured the truth of what being an RCA is like in an entertaining way. I worked in Pasco, WA (showing that even across the country it’s the same BS job) I was an RCA for 14 months and became career for about 5 months before quitting. During Christmas time as an RCA I worked 90 hours per week. The rest of the year was between 60 -80 hours per week. Its almost unbelievable until you experience it yourself. Thanks again for some validation of what I went through!
And I love this comment. Thanks for writing and sharing your experience!
Thank you for sharing your experience! I’ve always wondered why the mailman/lady is someone new every few weeks/months. Also, you are VERY funny!! Have you ever tried standup, this is a perfect story for it 🤗 best wishes to you!
Thank you so much, CC. Glad you enjoyed!
I immediately scrolled to the bottom and am leaving this comment without reading much at all. Drop the profanity and maybe I’ll listen.
Wait, you saw that little language note over at RuralInfo.net and clicked all the way through here just to say that?
You sanctimonious prig, you.
Too bad, Charlie Fred, you missed out on some good stuff!
Fuck off, Charlie!
LOL! My thoughts exactly.
Get over yourself, Charlie.
If you’re an RCA or a regular, please print out the form at the bottom of this link, get some signatures at your office and send it in to the address in Southmont, NC ASAP.
I’ve lost $14,000/year in pay, and my boxes and parcels have gone way up from a year ago. RRECS is evil and abusive.
https://decertifynrlca.com/
Thanks for sharing that link. Rural carriers, get to work. You need to push back against this punitive system.
That decertification petition has circulated in my office and I have signed it. NRLCA President Don Maston may as well be on management’s payroll. He’s clueless about parcel volume. When UPS drivers got that settlement this year via their Teamsters Union it was THE talk on our work room floor.
Everything written in this article is 1,000% accurate. Especially the part about the LLVs being so ragged. I’d be entering the Interstate ramp, pushing it to the point where the truck seemed ready to vibrate itself into pieces at 50MPH, worried a semi would run me over. And then the mirror would collapse back to the frame from the wind, and I was blind to traffic behind me!
I’m having nerve-jangling flashbacks just reading your post, Anonymous. Getting behind the wheel of an LLV really is taking your life in your hands.
It’s funny how people will say that the reason people won’t take jobs is because they don’t want to work.
In fact, it’s because they don’t want to work for companies where abuse is considered a feature of the job and a perk for managers. You were lucky to have a somewhat sympathetic manager; those who are abused often become the worst abusers of others.
Interestingly, the most abusive managers in the postal facility I worked at (West Palm Beach, Fla., GMF) were the women, who just felt they needed to show how tough they were. There was one who was hated by not only the workers but other managers; so much so, when she was in the hospital one time for a few weeks, no one came to visit her or inquire about her situation.
One woman was a female member of the KKK, and they put her in charge of a cohort of mostly black employees. She loved to call them the N-word and told them to go ahead and report her.
One woman manager I knew told me that the reason she was nice to her subordinates was that so many managers — male and female — were afraid of being caught at a mall or elsewhere by a subordinate. She said she caught a lot of flak from abusive managers who said she was “ruining” employees by not abusing them.
One female supervisor was such a beast, she actually drove to and from work in disguise. I happened to see her one day when I was driving somewhere, and at first didn’t recognize her but then realized it was her in a driver’s cap, gloves and hunched low behind the wheel. I think she saw me and thought I was going to do something, but of course I didn’t.
There was one male employee who looked like an innocent little boy, but he was a mentally ill loon who specialized in sexual harassment of female new-hires. One night, he fired a whole bunch of new hires because he forgot to collect their time cards after they punched in, and the only way to cover himself was to write them up and fire them all.
One (again, sorry) female supervisor on the OCR/BCS by mistake ran a whole mass of mail and sent it out before the mailer had paid for it. The signs said, clearly, “DO NOT PROCESS UNTIL CLEARED” but she did it anyway and got caught. She blamed it all on a young woman who had just started and got her fired to cover her ass.
I was never a letter carrier, but I see those old Grumman postal trucks and think to myself that they’re an accident waiting to happen.
When I quit the Postal Service in June 1994, I was told I was leaving just before the biggest changes ever, when things would improve for workers. I left anyway, and just feel bad for anyone who gets suckered into a job at the Postal Service.
Those of you who lasted as long as you did deserve recognition for leaving while you could.
Wow, just wow. Thanks for sharing your eye-opening experience. As bad as the post office was when you worked there, it sounds like you left at a good time.
1994! Those were the good old days in the Rural craft. I started as an RCA in 1992 and went regular in 1996. Since the late 1990s it has been all downhill. With the imposition of RRECS in 2023 the Rural Carrier craft is DEAD.
That’s an amazing story! There’s half your novel, right there. So funny. I love how so many bits of your route didn’t exist. The stuff of nightmares. People offering the worst jobs always seem to find ways to make them even worse, lower paid and difficult than they need to be.
Thanks, Jessica. That means so much to me coming from you. 😛
I actually enjoyed being a rural carrier for 6 years (rca for 2 1/2 prior to full time) however the postmaster bullied me out because he favored an rca that he wanted to hire before that rca decided to transfer to another office for a full time position. The PM even told me he would make my life hell if I didn’t retire. So how is it there is a shortage of carriers and PM are allowed to bully carriers?! Thank goodness for my own sanity I have a strong support system outside of the USPS!
Sorry to hear it, Adsie. Yes, I heard similar stories of bullying and abuse while I worked there, but fortunately, my station was considered the “best” in the area and our supervisors truly were caring and helpful.
Regarding a shortage of carriers, I saw loads of new people coming in during my trainings. The problem is the Postal Service is a meat grinder, chewing people up and spitting them out by the dozens.
I always did wonder why all of us new carriers were thrown right in to do the worst routes that nobody wanted. You’d think we’d get a few weeks to practice and grow our confidence doing some of the easier routes first, but I guess that’s not how the Postal Service works.
Thanks for writing, and I’m glad to hear you left with your sanity intact!
With the new rrecs system…all the routes in my office keep going up in evaluation..but no way to pay us for the extra workload and no process or procedure to fairly lower our routes..mgts biggest solution is for every route in office loose 10k each per year..how is that a fair solution? I don’t build houses on my route nor did I beg for more amazon parcels these two things keep making our routes too big to opearte
Yeah, the “parcels” thing is a huge problem for USPS as it is entirely incapable of handling the burden. People can’t even imagine what rural carriers go through every “Amazon Sunday” when each parcel scan results in three different numbers (only one of them correct) denoting that parcel’s order along a delivery route. It’s madness, and it was one of my biggest gripes by far.
I’d always said the “p” in USPS stands for “postal,” not “parcel” or “package.” Until USPS can get its systems in order, it needs to focus on delivering the mail, period.
The USPS, especially with RRECS imposed upon the Rural craft, has stripped the gears of its delivery apparatus. After 31 years in the Rural craft (first 4 as RCA) I can’t recognize what the job has become in 2023. We had a good new RCA in our office who quit after RRECS took effect.
The usps used to be a more professional environment until about 1998. It has since hired and promoted so many family and friends into mgmt positions, regardless of experience or capabilities, the corporate structure is toxic. I worked there for 35 years. I left to get another job because couldn’t stand the abuse by mgmt and the physical wreck my body had become after all those years of carrying heavy items.
I was an OJI for new hires. You are optimistic in 3 of 10 staying. Usps stats say 2 of 10 will stay 6 months. 1 of 35 will stay a year. The job is nothing like the public perceive it to be. And the equipment you must interact with is a workshop in corporate, aggressive employee hatred.
Thank you for trying. But, ultimately we all fail in this system.
Wow, official USPS stats say only 2 new carriers in 10 will stay 6 months? And 1 in 35 a year? Incredible.
Thanks for writing.
Yes, 1998 was about the time that the Rural Carrier job started its downhill slide. With RRECS in 2023 it went over the cliff. After 31 years I have to retire technically, but in actuality quit.
RCA for 20 yrs. I have no idea why I stay.
I continue to be stunned that RCAs uniformly lack a reason “why” they work these jobs. But then I look back at my own experience and read these harrowing stories about the terrible things the new compensation system is doing to RCA pay, and suddenly, I’m not only glad that I got out, but also upset that I got fooled into starting with USPS in the first place.
Rural carriers work their asses off, and you all deserve much better.
Pretty damn accurate. I’m 27 yrs in and things just keep getting worse bit by bit. Thank you for writing this.
You’re welcome! There’s a reason why so many new carriers that I trained with have now also quit. Turnover like that is a sure sign of trouble. Try to hang in there and I hope things improve.
Yes, I’m 31 years in and it has gone downhill the last 24-27 years or so. Today’s Rural Carrier job is unrecognizable compared to 1992 when I hired on.
USPS has really gone downhill over my 30 years of service. With RRECS disaster starting in May, I definitely know I need to get out.
Yes, I overheard some of my colleagues discussing RRECS (short for Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System) before I left. As I understand it, this automated system for calculating rural carrier pay is being rushed to implementation and contains serious flaws that could reduce the pay of 2/3 of carriers significantly. In a letter from Senator Ron Wyden to Congress, Wyden notes that “RRECS imposes an intense system of worker surveillance on rural carriers that requires them to log every tiny task of their daily routes using devices that frequently malfunction” — a charge that surprises me not at all.
Too bad, as this job is difficult enough and the pay, from what I can tell, is already lacking. Good luck to you and all the other rural carriers in your fight.
Wow! It seems like once anyone works in a government~related job all brain cells are lost. I work in a public school & things are not much better. 💁🏻♀️
Gosh, Anonymous, are you calling me slow? Haha, no worries, I know what you meant. I wish things were different, but these institutions seem broken.