My Secret Life as a Postman

The unexpected story of a businessman

Photo by Max Adulyanukosol on Unsplash

Copenhagen, on the bicycle — fresh air and exercise. If you have ever visited the Danish capital, you must have noticed how bicycles are everywhere — being ridden or parked, but everywhere.

The post also uses them. And for many years, the Danish Mail was even designing its own bicycles, specially made for carrying several heavy bags full of mail.

My life was going down the pan

Not fully, and I must admit when looking back, that it was tough even before that time, but it felt extra tough in the situation. Very.

I had been extremely busy for a number of years working in other companies as a consultant, project manager, and manager — and then starting my own company, and another, building up two companies in parallel—working day and night, every day of every week for several years.

Until one day, someone who was supposed to be a friend and partner in one of the companies, working as a sub-contractor but with direct contact with the main clients — decided to “grab the money and run”, so to speak: he agreed secretly with clients over some time that he would leave my company and take the clients with him; work with them through his own company instead.

And so it happened, I lost all income, and the greedy former friend even took me to court because he wanted even more money, on top of the very high percentage of the earnings that he had already been given throughout our collaboration.

I couldn’t manage to resolve the situation, had very little income but still all the expenses, and I had to close one company, and the other followed it down.

And I had nothing — apart from depts. The court agreed with that terrible guy that he should indeed have more, and what all ended up with was that he should get more commission than the customers had paid for his work. Which was, of course, money that didn’t exist, so I suddenly owed him a lot of money that I could not pay.

All the other creditors also wanted more, many of them smelling blood and inventing amounts that they hoped could somehow sneak through the quality control and just get paid in the chaos. Some of them added an endless stream of punishment fees of various kinds to the depts, whether mandated or not, and some took me to court to get more money.

But there wasn’t any money.

The mortgage could not be paid, so my apartment had to be sold, and the real estate office seems to have had a double agenda, selling it too cheaply to the owner, only for him to immediately sell it for more to a client. What I got was only enough to end the loans. Nothing was left.

I myself ended up in a terrible place with child gangs assaulting old people and my neighbor being a drug dealer regularly being visited by shouting customers (they were standing on the street and shouting to him that they wanted drugs) or the police — at one time a full squadron of officers dressed for war was breaking into his apartment. And all the other neighbors being vandals, threatening, or simply just very noisy.

I was getting quite depressed.

But I could see the sky

In the midst of all this misery, I was happy that I got into a new study — was accepted at the university and began studying.

With this, I could apply for study aid, and it was granted. That was good, but it was not enough to pay even for the rent, let alone all the other costs, such as needed study books — or food.

So I was looking for work.

And one option seemed extra interesting — being a postman; an extra help on Saturdays.

Back on the horse again

After applying for the postman job, an uncertain period followed, as typical for job applications. It seems to be important for employers of all kinds to not support the applicants in their life situation — where they often are worried, troubled, desperate. I guess that if calculating how many troubled hours are being lived on that account, it ranks at the top of things that trouble people around the world.

Just a naive thought, of course, but what would happen to the world if employers always answered quickly? If they considered it a duty to help the applicants out of their troubled situation or at least, if that was not possible, to clarify the situation quickly so that the applicant could move on in another direction?

I don’t remember how long I had to wait, but maybe it wasn’t very long. And then I was invited to take a test! Quite positive — and somehow they also communicated a bit of info about what I could expect from the test, which kinds of questions, and a suggestion to study their website carefully before the test.

It turned out that most of the test was about recognizing different parts of a bicycle and reading both machine and handwritten addresses on envelopes, deciding to whom a letter had to be delivered.

After another waiting time, I got a message that I had passed — and an invitation to meet a postmaster at a post office not too far away for an interview.

Happy days!

At the interview, some common interview questions were asked, but I liked that guy immediately, as he started out by saying that usually, the candidates were somewhat younger, and to me he didn’t need to direct all the same questions as he would to them. He showed me respect.

However, he also told me that it was the first time he had a candidate like me for an interview — and by that, he meant someone who had an education.

And then I started wondering. I still do :)

But I got the job.

The rise and fall of the postal services

There is a long and proud history hidden in the delivery of letters. Often these services developed into being the pride of a country — being able to send letters fast and reliably was considered a quality mark for hundreds of years.

But then Al Gore invented the internet (maybe with a little assistance from some scientists and a huge amount of other people). And it became widespread.

So wide and so fast, that all the world’s postal establishments were completely shocked and unable to deal with the situation:

What would become of them if everybody would send e-mails instead of paper-mails?

Some of them began offering services where you could send them an email, then they would print it, put it in an envelope and then they would deliver it for you in the good old way.

Others looked at offering various types and shapes of electronic mailboxes — where you would send an email to that one, now named an official mailbox, instead of sending it directly to people's own email accounts. And people would then need to log in through complicated mechanisms to be allowed to read it. This actually became rather popular and is still in effect in many places. Somehow it appears to be logical to some.

But the predicted drop in old-fashioned letters made of paper and transported by horse, plane, boat, truck — or bicycle — to the recipient who could be behind the seven mountains and the seven valleys, or next door; well, that happened.

Suddenly people on the other side of the Earth would often prefer to get their message in a split second rather than waiting for weeks. And the neighbor would, apparently, be happy to have only electronic contact with you.

Society changed, and, being in shock, the postal services at first decided to simply make everything they used to be good at, worse.

They reduced the service levels, increased the prices, expanded the delivery routes to the maximum possible, or more, they fired all their experienced staff, and hired students or whoever they could get for the lowest possible salaries, and they added the distribution of commercials to their repertoire, letting these poorly paid students work hard for their money.

A process that is still going on. Wherever anything can get worse, it is being made worse, just to make sure that if anyone still wants to send a traditional letter they will be scared away from doing so. Because the postal services can now calculate that they lose an amount of money for each letter they deliver. So, says their logic, better not deliver any.

Me in this mess

I started. The requirement was to spend a full week during weekdays (or was it even two?) for an initial round of training, which was difficult to arrange due to my studies and another part-time job I had been so fortunate to get. But I managed to do it, was happy about the money I earned, and definitely about the multitude of things I learned:

• Don’t run up and down the stairs without at least one hand on the banister — many postmen have fallen down the stairs, getting seriously injured

• Expect that the door now and then will be abruptly opened while you are in the middle of putting the mail through it, and an angry man will come out and complain about everything he finds wrong with society, the postal service, and you: He would want the mail earlier, there is a package on the way with something he has ordered on the internet and it still hasn’t arrived — “Where is it?!”, he finds that the government is weak and destroying the country, and he is for whatever reason angry that you do not have an official uniform yet (would be granted only after three months in the position).

• Don’t put your finger together with the letters a bit through the letter slot — there may be a dog there that will snap at your fingers.

• And speaking about dogs: there will be some in the gardens, and they will hate you and try to bite you — for whatever reason, postmen are valid prey for domestic dogs.

• No matter your physical shape: running up and down stairs for 8 hours after getting up in the middle of the night to sort the letters — is tough!

• And something I learned the hard way: If you live in a terrible place with noisy neighbors who insist on partying with loud music, screaming, and shouting every Friday evening until Saturday morning, you will not survive long in a job as a Saturday postman. Running up and down the stairs for 8 hours without having slept even just a little bit is indeed very tough.

But I learned about people as well (not those terrible neighbors):

• Low-paid, un-educated people with tough jobs and often tough life conditions in general, are hard-working, loyal people who behave well and help out colleagues who need it — completely in contrast with the high-paid, highly educated people with easy jobs I had been working with most of my professional career

• They all had a deep faith in the value of their work, knowing how important a letter could be for people — and feeling connected with their “customers”, ordinary people of all kinds who found the postal service to be a natural part of modern life and wouldn’t want to be without it.

The aftermath

I never got my official uniform, as I decided to stop before I had been there for three months.

I needed the money, I sort of liked the work even though it was tough — the routes were too long, and the number of commercials to bring ridiculously large (needing to arrange several deposits of mail/commercials along the route as the bicycle couldn’t carry all of it in one go — even with three big bags on it).

But I couldn’t deliver. After a number of very early Saturday mornings with no sleep, still a tremendous amount of noise from the neighbors at the time when I was to get out of bed and off to work — I found that I had no energy for it and was reporting myself ill a couple of times, and then feeling how big a problem that was for my boss and my colleagues who then had to work extra.

I didn’t want to be that bad colleague who could not be trusted.

More aftermath

Several years later, when I again needed an extra job, I applied for a job in the postal services. I had in the meantime jumped countries and was now living on the other side of the street, literally, between Denmark and Sweden, but I could easily go by train or car to the other side and work there with sorting and packaging mail all night, but I was rejected. I applied in the other country as well for similar jobs, but no.

My guess is that either my experience weighted in negatively, or I had become too old. Having the physics of a 25-year-old is one of the main conditions in that business, where, apparently, other competencies weigh in less.

The memory

The postal services are no longer what they once were. Whatever is still left of them is all the time being reduced and dismantled. There is no pride in having a fast and reliable postal service; it rather seems to be an embarrassment for today’s politicians, such one that they would want to see disappear completely.

I am no longer what I once was. I am wiser now :) I have learned from my brief contact with a world of honor, loyalty, helpfulness — and its dark vision and future of everything constantly getting worse.

This, together with the experience from various other types of jobs at different levels in different companies has helped shape my understanding of what real values are and how those idiotic goals and KPIs of modern companies are really just producing bad behavior from some of the employees, who are then breaking down the others.

So I am happy that I knew what the different parts of a bicycle were called and how to read an address on a letter. I wouldn’t want to be without this memory — without this piece of my brain puzzle.