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I always thought being a postman would be quite relaxing. Walking around listening to music, talking with the local community and enjoying being out in the elements. On day one I found out I couldn’t be more wrong. From the moment I stepped in the door I was swept off my feet – it was the Christmas period.
The sorting office was so busy that I could barely see the stations that were buried underneath hundreds of packages, all scheduled to go out that day. It didn’t help that there were about 100 red blurs running around screaming “this isn’t my package, it’s Jamie’s” or “that’s way too much for me to deliver today”.
It was hectic. There were parcels flying across the room and I’d only been standing in the office for about three minutes. Yet after asking a few friendly faces where I was supposed to be, I finally found the manager. He took me to one side and told me that I would have to wait until the storm had died down and the rest of the posties had left before he assigned me to my duties.
That was when I found out I was on Christmas clean-up duty, taking the deliveries that were just too much for a single postie to take in one day.
It didn’t help that I had no clue where I was going or where half of these addresses were in the massive postcode of NG3. While the mail was numbered for me as it is for all new starters, so they can get their bearings with the routes, it didn’t help that the bag you wanted to find was buried under about 50-60 parcels and 10 other bags of mail.
This may seem relatively simple and it was. If you can count and read then no problem, but what happens then is that the addresses stop following on, and you are sat there lost in an area you don’t know, it’s getting dark and you can barely get your phone to turn on because your hands are so cold that you can’t check where you are.
Well, that was my life for about a month before I figured out how I should be doing the job, and by that point, the Christmas rush was over.
So how did I manage to get through it all? Like any other normal person would – just get up and get to it. Putting in around 20,000 steps a day I would trudge through the streets of Nottingham going down every alleyway possible in order to find where the addresses I needed. Sometimes I have to admit it was a lost cause and I left it for a more experienced pavement pounder to tackle.
My first month wasn’t helped by all the horror stories I kept getting told by my colleagues. One day one of the oldest posties in the office, or “Grandad” as the other posties called him, told me he found a new starter sitting on the floor surrounded by unordered mail sobbing because they couldn’t work it out.
After a few months there, I moved out of delivering to a certain area. I was then told that half the office avoided it like the plague and flat-out refused to work there because of the threats they had received while the other half either lived there or just didn’t mind it.
Luckily, though, my intuition pulled through, and I was able to get through the hazing that was Christmas. Throughout the month of sore legs and early mornings, the shifts were made that much merrier by the supportive customers who would give me Christmas tips, sweets and even some cakes to help me persist through the dire weather.
My rose-tinted glasses had fallen off by the end of week one, but I persisted. Honestly the main thing that kept me going was the camaraderie shared by my colleagues. They would sing songs, play pranks and genuinely try to help you out wherever they could. Except if it was a dreaded Wednesday, then it was every postie for themselves.
While most people wouldn’t expect Wednesday to be that bad for deliveries, they couldn’t be more wrong. It was a feared day in a postie’s week, one that filled everyone with dread. As while Christmas was already bad enough on “normal days”, Wednesdays were like hell on earth. There were so many packages and so much mail that you would have thought someone had stockpiled it all just to spite the delivery office.
You could always tell how bad you were going to get it on a Wednesday by how much you had on Tuesdays, as all of the weekend deliveries would be sent out all at the same time so you would be swimming in parcels all day. Curiously, though, despite asking many of my colleagues, no one really knew why Wednesdays were the worst – although everyone had a theory.
A light Tuesday would usually fill you with hope and a childlike sense that it was going to get better that week, but sometimes it just meant that the delivery for that day had come in late, so you were stuck with piles and piles of mounting parcels and mail.
All in all, it was a hard time to don the red and get out and about, but it made the rest of my seven-month tenure feel like a breeze. Despite all the complaining that I have done, the job will forever be cemented in my mind as a good period of my life.
