Packages, Packages: The Rewards and Trials of Postal Workers During the Holiday Season

Take time to think not just of loved ones during the Christmas shopping season, but of the grueling labor required to deliver your packages -- especially during Covid-disrupted 2021.

One more load of packages. December, 2019.

BREVARD — I’m nagged by guilt these days, knowing that I could be helping some good and deserving people, and am not.

I’m thinking not of the faceless billions worldwide suffering from disease or desperate poverty — though, this being the season of charity, them too.

I’m thinking of my old colleagues at the U.S. Postal Service, where I worked for three years until the end of September — long enough to associate December’s gray, leafless landscape with the delivery of Christmas packages. Packages, packages, packages.

Each morning on the sorting floor of the Brevard Post Office, the clerks stack them into miniature cities of cardboard — narrow alleys and towering brown walls emblazoned with the taunting smiles of the Amazon logo.

Each day, the carriers dismantle this urban landscape, loading boxes into their vehicles and distributing them — pretty darned precisely, I’d say, given the volume — to front porches throughout the city and county.

The regular carriers, even during non-pandemic, fully staffed holiday seasons, have it the worst, typically working on their designated days off and carrying and sorting mail as well as parcels.

But there are plenty of these left over for the subs, which is what I was. Rural carriers make deliveries in their own vehicles, usually compact SUVs fitted with jury-rigged right-hand-drive assemblies.

These are no match for all the thousands of parcels, from tiny boxes with a maddening tendency to slip unnoticed under seats, to space-eating behemoths — chain saws, shop vacs, and, especially in 2019, hundreds and hundreds of accursed Instant Pots. It will live in infamy as the year of the Instant Pot.

At the end of the day, I could barely summon the energy to pop the top of a can of beer or stay awake to stream a show. Just as you see white lines when you close your eyes after a long drive, I saw nothing, dreamed of nothing, but parcels and addresses.

Not that I’m complaining. Though I worked all but a couple of days between the last few Thanksgivings and Christmases, sometimes long after dark, I found the job, well, kind of fun.

It was active, outdoor work that regularly took me to the most remote and scenic corners of the county. It was a chance to learn about my adopted home, and I incorporated my growing mental database of addresses into a game I played with people I met. I’d ask them where they lived. No, I’d press them, on what street, and on what part of the street? Right, I’d say, you’re in that little blue house at 224 Doohickey Lane.

Stop, my wife had to tell me. You’re freaking them out.

Podcasts, I have come to believe, are the defining innovation of the 21st century, and I probably learned more history in the last three years than I did in college. Immersed in the origin story of Hadrian's Wall or George Jones' He Stopped Loving Her Today, I sometimes barely noticed I’d arrived at my next stop.

There was the epic challenge of getting packages on the road after the foot-plus snowfall of 2018, and the routine ones of mounting vertiginous, rutted, gravel driveways and dodging frustrated, teeth-baring, tethered dogs in mobile home parks.

Then there were the people. Postal workers get a bad rap, I think, still suffering from the old stigma of Son of Sam and the “going Postal” era. They are not disgruntled, by and large. They are mostly conscientious and hardworking, a disproportionate number of them women serving as the financial rocks of their families.

And good things happen when folks team up to do a job as important as making Christmas happen for a whole county. Politics refreshingly recede into the background, as do, at least from my white male perspective, considerations of race and gender.

Do you show up? Do you work fast and get the right package to the right address? If so, you’re okay. Or better than that, appreciated. I got more messages from coworkers and supervisors, expressing more gratitude, than I have in any other job in my life.

And frankly, this is what I needed after retiring too early from an increasingly irrelevant industry. I needed to be needed.

If home, as Robert Frost wrote, is the place where they have to take you in, work is the place where they take you in only if you’re useful. And when I pulled into the Post Office’s fenced-in employee lot each morning, I never asked myself why I was there, never doubted I was welcome. 

I don’t regret my decision to leave the job when I did — after giving, by the way, a full month’s notice. My chronic back pain has cleared up. I have more time to work on this site and to do what I moved here to do, take in mountain scenery in leisure rather than in pressure-packed labor.

And I’d long felt, earning $19 an hour with minimal benefits for all-consuming work — even if it was part time for most of the rest of the year — underpaid.

A lot of other carriers, especially subs, apparently felt the same way. Several of them left about the time I did, and the Post Office, like just about every other public and private operation in this county, has had a hard time filling vacancies.

Which means, from what my old friends tell me, this package season is even harder than usual, especially for regulars who are delivering more of their own parcels with less help. They are loading up and heading back out after completing their routes. They can be seen out on the road delivering Amazon parcels on Sundays, which used to be strictly for subs.

I feel for them and, maybe, so should all of us who have come to depend so heavily on online shopping.

Nobody’s going to give it up entirely, but if you want to help your carriers and community, consider picking up some of your Christmas gifts at local shops, maybe one of the many new ones in booming downtown Brevard.

And though it’s technically not allowed, few carriers would object if you slip $20 or even $50 (hey, inflation is back) into an envelope clearly marked with their names.

But the least you can do is remember and appreciate their hard work.

Give them a thumbs-up when you pass them on the road. Thank them when they climb the stairs to your porch.

Trust me, it makes a difference.

More packages. Last day on the job, September 2021.

Editor’s note: I am planning a story on the impact of short-term rentals on the housing market. If you have been forced to leave your house or apartment because the owner is converting it to a vacation property, feel free to reach out.

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com