Postal Service, part III

I want to preface this post by saying that I am not of the 'every body receives a gold star for participation' generation. I don't expect to be coddled in a job until I find my footing. However, I do expect that I am able to gather all tools necessary in order to perform a job and, if the tools aren't readily available, ask for and receive them. And I find bullying behavior loathsome. 

My first three days at the post office were to be in training with another carrier called an on-the-job-instructor, or OJI. The OJI was around my age and had been a carrier for two decades. It was from the OJI that I would be learning the ropes, gleaning tips and tricks and understanding the basic ABCs of the world of letter carriers. Right after we were introduced he told me that just over two years ago his shop steward and management had conspired to take away 80% of the route he'd walked for nearly 20 years while other carriers in the unit only had their routes altered about 40%. He felt personally slighted by the restructuring and angrily quit the union in response. This story told me two things: The OJI hates his job and would probably not be giving me much in terms of training and that the shop steward is likely in bed with management. I put those red flags in my back pocket, as it were, and pressed on. But as one might imagine, this was not a good starting point for a new hire. 

Being a carrier isn't too mentally taxing, but there is a lot of information at the start to ingest and keeping it all in mind can feel overwhelming. Physically, working as a letter carrier involves a fair amount of walking and weather extremes can make the job all the more challenging. Fortunately, I had come from a the world of window washing and gutter cleaning and was well-versed in both working outdoors and with physical work. 

During the first three days, my OJI was to impart to me approximately 120 bits of work-related information. There was a multi-page checklist given to all new-hires and I was to initial each bit of info. on said checklist after I learned it. I was then meant to hand over the pages to the OJI and he, in turn, would give it to the manager after having initialled it all himself. The OJI hadn't yet finished casing the mail (sorting the mail in sequential order for a given route) when we first met, so he sent me with the checklist to the breakroom saying, 'Could you just initial this column--finger pointing to a middle column--on each page and I'll be with you in ten minutes. 

I sat in the breakroom reading over the paperwork. From my classroom training, I was able to initial about four bits of information. The rest was unknown. That the OJI expected me to blindly initial the whole checklist at the beginning of day one made me feel ill at ease. I returned the paperwork to him saying that I initialled what I could, but did not yet know all the information, so I'd wait to mark the rest. He took the paperwork from me and we went to load the work vehicle with both mail and parcels for my first day out on the route.