People Get Personal About Their Pleasing Moments Of Revenge

"In summer of 1991, I found a summer job as a 'casual carrier' for the USPS.

They used to hire summer temps to cover for all the full-time carriers who mostly took their vacations in the summer.

The USPS had (has?) rules that things had to be delivered within certain time windows. People could get fired if they took too long to do tasks. Carriers were both openly and secretly monitored and timed on tasks and we had the first computerized time system I ever saw.

They would be secretly followed a few times per year to be sure they were working hard the entire time they were outside the post office. The post office building even had secret back hallways, passive sound monitoring, and hidden raised viewing areas where they could see the sorting floor unobserved – cameras and microphones were super expensive back then so this was all done using tricky architecture and the eyes and ears of the postal inspectors.

We were supposed to walk over and punch in and out of tasks so that they could track productivity to the second. People walking a delivery route were expected to do it FAST and better routes went to faster carriers. Slow carriers got mercilessly hassled to be faster and were disciplined for slowness. Look at Newman on Seinfeld. 'Going postal' due to overwork was not really a joke there, because people would flip out and murder their bosses.

I hear it’s worse now with GPS.

Pre-Internet, there used to be a huge volume of mail that got shuffled around the country every day. Quantities of mail that you would find hard to believe compared to what we see now. I was a broke college student home for the summer and was willing to work any hours they gave me, so the supervisors liked me.

I was also very friendly with most of the Full-time (FT) carriers because I was a good worker and didn’t rock the boat. Also, for other reasons that you’ll see below.

I’m a fairly big guy (6’5” or about 195cm, about 210 lbs back then) and I could carry a lot of weight so that also made management happy. I was also in my early 20s with long legs so I could move fast carrying a lot of weight.

Sorting mail back then was labor-intensive and took a lot of time to learn. I had a regular route that I would deliver in the afternoons that was sorted by a regular. I would usually do oddball delivery stuff in the mornings, help move heavy things around, do special deliveries, etc.

I would also deliver for FT carriers that went on vacation or whose T6 was on vacation.

Side note – mail delivery is 6x per week but FT carriers only work 5 days per week. The T6 is an FT carrier who did the sixth day for five routes. That way it worked out that everyone only worked 5 days per week.

At the time, a lot of retail catalogs were mailed to houses. A LOT of them. Some were substantially bigger than current magazines.

We also delivered magazines, ads, packages, and samples. A lot of companies would mail free samples of products like laundry detergent, shampoo, and other liquids to be delivered to every house on the route. These were the bane of the carriers’ existence because they were bulky and heavy. This slows you down and is physically taxing. Usually, carriers would divide the very heavy stuff up and deliver it throughout the week.

On to the revenge.

I was assigned to do the T6 work for Dave (name changed) for a few months. Picture a failed Phys Ed teacher in his 40s. Bad mustache, about 5’7”, wore knock-off sunglasses like Magnum PI’s, and had an opinion about everything. Dave learns he has me as his T6 and decides he will leave all of the heavy stuff for me.

So, once a week I got confronted with the entire week’s worth of heavy mail for this jerk’s route. I confronted him about it and he basically laughed and said there was nothing I could do about it. The other FT carriers didn’t like Dave much, but I was a temp and he was there permanently so I was encouraged to just suck it up.

I went to our boss and escalated to our postmaster but was told that he was FT and I was a temp so I just had to deal with it. If the mail needed to be delivered that day to meet the deadline, I had to make it happen. The postmaster’s exact words were, 'Just deliver every piece of mail for the route as fast as you can and don’t worry about the time it takes or anything else.

You’re making huge OT on this route.' They did talk to Dave and the most egregious stuff stopped, but I was still doing most of the hard work on this route.

I mentioned earlier that everyone was always on the clock and tracked. In my first week, some of the nicer people took me aside at the beginning of the summer and made it clear to me that I was not to move quickly when delivering FT carrier’s routes because it could make them look bad and cause trouble for them.

As a temp, I should always take longer than the FT carriers because (1) my job was limited and the USPS did not really track temps closely; (2) I had zero experience so everything should take me longer; (3) this was a union shop and they would hate to have to kick my butt for messing up their jobs; and (4) most of these people were awesome and I wanted to be a team player. So, I was incentivized to move slowly and not make the FT people look bad. Side note – I am very pro-union and pro-labor so this is not intended to knock unions, but the context is needed.

I decided to wreck Dave’s job since he was such a bullying little tool. I requisitioned two additional mail carrier bags. These are the over-the-shoulder satchels you see all the time.

I was asked why and I specifically told them it was to be able to carry all of the heavy items on Dave’s route without having to keep going back to my jeep to reload along the way. The postmaster personally approved it.

After doing Dave’s route 1 to 3 times per week (he called in sick a lot, too) for a few weeks I knew it very well and was staying on top of the heavy stuff.

Once I was comfortable with the route, I started RUNNING it. I would literally load up 3 mail bags for each segment of the route and jog or run his entire route. Dave’s route took him about 4.5 hours per day to walk. This was probably accurate for him and he’d been on the route for several years. I would finish it in 3 hours or less. Every day. Rain or shine. No matter how many magazines, samples, or packages were waiting.

No one really noticed I was coming back so quickly and punching back out of delivering his route when I was only doing it a few times per week. I would come back, pick up other work and get that done. The fun started when Dave took a 2-week vacation and I handled his route 6 days per week.

Since I was doing the work right, there was never a backlog of heavy items landing on me once per week. This made it even easier to jog or run his route as I was back to using one mailbag and fast-walking/jogging was enough to get it done quickly. I frequently got it done in under three hours and never took longer than about 3.5 hours. My personal best was under 2.5 hours.

I got pulled aside by my supervisor and the postmaster after the first week. They asked me about my timekeeping practices and I confirmed that I was doing things correctly. I would punch into his route on departure, keep the appropriate logs, and punch back in when I got back. The Postmaster then asked me about Dave’s route.

I played completely dumb. He noted that I complained about the mail volume several weeks ago and that I used to take 6, 7, or more hours to get it delivered. I explained that I was spreading the heavy deliveries out over the whole week and that had really made a difference. He asked me if I was really delivering all the mail and whether I was hiding or throwing away mail – a serious problem if true. I got very offended and told him I delivered every piece of mail for the route, every day.

Then I dropped the bomb.

I told him I was having trouble understanding why this route was budgeted 4.5 hours to deliver when it clearly could be done much faster than that. I pointed out that it was a lot of dense multi-family housing, which means less walking.

I told him lots of people on the route seemed surprised that I did not want a soda pop or to sit down and talk for a minute like Dave always did with them (pure lies). All in my innocent, gosh-I-want-to-help-the-USPS voice. I told the postmaster that I was delivering all the mail as fast as I could and not worrying about anything else.

I jogged the route again for the next 6 days and kept getting it done in much less time than Dave.

Dave did not know about any of this. He made a point of finding me on his first day back to ask how I enjoyed doing all the hard work for him while he was vacationing. I told him I’d learned a lesson about how to treat your coworkers. He laughed at me and went back to sorting mail. He came back a few minutes later and said he got me a souvenir, he then pulled his middle finger out of his pocket. Classic Dave.

That was my last week at the USPS and I headed back to college. I kept in touch with some of the friends I’d made there and one of them was very happy to tell me that Dave was fired about two months after I left. Due to the massive discrepancy in how long it took me and him to deliver the route, the higher-ups audited his route and discovered that he actually was lollygagging, taking unauthorized breaks, and apparently having an affair with a woman on his route – all on the clock.

I, on the other hand, was in great physical shape after all that running and had pockets full of money for that semester. His regular T6 also got most of the heavy stuff dumped on her, so she didn’t get into any trouble for her delivery times because she was swamped with heavy mail on her day. She actually bid for and got the route full time when Dave was shown the door."