Moving To The Next Chapter Of Life

Reader Contribution by Lois Hoffman
Published on March 29, 2016
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This week there will be tears of joy and sadness. Nearly everyone dreams of that day when they can retire from their chosen (or sometimes not chosen) profession and spend the rest of their life doing what they want to do. After 29 years I will be hanging up my blues and retiring from the United States Postal Service. This decision, one of the hardest ones I have ever made, is bittersweet.

As with any job, there is good and bad and being a city letter carrier is no different. Perhaps the biggest challenge has been the weather. You know the old saying “Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow …” Well, it is 100% true and, even though I grew up as a farm girl and love being outside, there were days that I definitely had second thoughts. I think the worst was the driving, cold rain. After all these years I can positively say that there is no way you can keep yourself and the mail dry on such days. Miserable is the only way to describe it.

You know how they always ask a person if their glass is half full or half empty. Being on the positive side, mine has always been half full, so let’s talk about the good first. Hands down, it is the people I will miss the most. I have been blessed by meeting some truly wonderful folks through this job. There are some people I have seen nearly every day for 29 years. It’s a gray area when they changed from customer to friend, but now many of them have become true friends and we socialize outside of work. I have watched many of their kids grow up and now those kids have kids. If I am not careful, that will definitely make me feel old!

I still find it amazing that still, in this day of modern technology, delivering the mail is one of the few jobs remaining where it is customer service on a one-to-one basis. People know that we come to their home day after day and sometimes we are the only interaction they have. It’s nice to know that, besides the mail, we can bring a smile to someone’s day.

On the down side, I can remember when I started we went in the office and sorted the mail and actually delivered the mail … period. Simple. Now everything has changed, some for the better and some not. Everything is tracked now, and this is not necessarily a bad thing because people know where their packages are. But, have we gone too far? Customers can go online and know within the hour when to expect their parcels. Isn’t just knowing the day good enough?  Upper management needs to know how long I am in the office, how long I am on the street, they track me with GPS in our scanners. I’m sure they even know how many times I go to the restroom.

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