For the last two nights, Terry and I have been working at our local Post Office hub. We’re both very lucky to have landed these jobs, because after I lost my job in October, money has been really tight. We were worried we weren’t going to be able to afford to move to Orlando in time for Terry’s school to start. But the Post Office job has become our lifeline.
The hiring process was long, drawn out, and stressful. We applied in October and had been required to show up at the Post Office three times before they even told us we had the job. We didn’t know we had actually been hired until last Thursday, when they told us to show up at 8 in the morning on Monday for a safety orientation. At the orientation , they told us when to show up for work that night. Terry and I both got the midnight- 6am shift. So, Terry went off to his normal shift at his other job while I stayed home and vainly attempted to nap for most of the day. At 11:30, we ventured into the night.
In an attempt to spare you all the niggling details, let me just say that the room behind the front counter is a vast and terrifying wonderland. You can hardly see from one side to the other, and the whole space is full of huge machinery and people moving the mail around and more people driving forklifts. Frankly, I was completely boggled and totally terrified. Not only was I going to singlehandedly going to mess up the entire Florida Panhandle’s mail, I was also going to get so lost that no one would ever find my body. The floor supervisor separated Terry and I from the rest of the shift’s casuals and led us to something called the Flat Sorter (I was so busy being happy that Terry and I were going to be able to work together that I didn’t pay attention to exactly where the flat sorter was, meaning that I did in fact get lost later that night coming back from the water fountain). Basically, we took things like magazines, manila envelopes, and bills out of white boxes on one conveyor belt and put them into green boxes on another conveyor belt. We had to make sure everything had an address and that this went face-up in the green boxes so that the fancy address-reading machine would be able to do it’s job. It was pretty fun and interesting (remarkably so, in fact. I was afraid that it would be monotonous and boring-as-hell, but it actually was pretty cool.) After we went through ALL of the flats, we were sent out to the back docks to help put packages on the trucks. This was the really interesting part. One big crate would come in, which we (we being about 15 people) divided by ZIP code and then by neighborhood for in-city packages. Once that was done, we pushed all the crates to their corresponding numbered dock where they were rolled into trucks. It was all really confusing, but there was an awesome underlying order to it all.
It’s amazing how many hands your mail passes through before it gets to your mailbox, not to mention all the work that those hands do to get it there.
