Why my friend's job delivers without paying a packet

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5fefc3a0-6f43 ... ck_check=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A postman picks up a letter from a pile, looks at the address and slowly puts it into a pigeonhole. Then he takes another and repeats the process. Nearby, a group of colleagues stand watching him. They are worried about him as they can see things aren't quite right. Later, they discover that he has been threatened by a violent thug and so pay the thug a visit and spray him with red paint. Job done, the biggest of them - fondly known as "Meatballs" - triumphantly explains the reason for his heroism: "I'm a f***ing postman!"

A few days after I watched this unlikely scene from Looking for Eric, Ken Loach's new comedy, I heard the same words repeated by an acquaintance at a garden party in Oxfordshire - though this time without the expletive.

The last time I'd seen this man he was the marketing director of a business that sold organic TV dinners. But since then his company had been sold to a multinational and, after a brief spell as a consultant to the new buyer, he had been eased out altogether.

For a while he had looked for similar work but discovered that in a recession no one wants to pay an unemployed 56-year-old a six-figure salary to work in marketing. So he thought again and decided to try his hand at the job that he had wanted to do ever since he was a boy. He looked at me triumphantly. "I'm a postman," he said.

"Blimey," I said. "What's it like?" He said it was quite the best job he'd ever had.

And then I thought of the film, and wondered if Loach was right after all. Was there a special camaraderie among men who put letters through the holes in doors? Or was the less sentimental US view of postmen more accurate - that they are less likely to help their colleagues than to kill them? In the 1980s and 1990s there was a spate of nasty incidents in US post offices where workers went nuts and started shooting workmates - as a result of which there is the special expression "to go postal" to describe anyone who gets uncontrollably angry at work.

My acquaintance confirmed that his fellow postmen were neither terribly nice nor terribly nasty. There was no heart-warming camaraderie; instead there was a mild hostility caused by the fact that he works part time and they resent part timers. He pitches up at a relatively leisurely 7.30am to deliver the letters that full timers have already been sorting for two hours.

Morale, in any case, was quite low. The business is contracting at about 10 per cent a year. And postmen are now being forced to walk faster and deliver back-breaking quantities of junk mail.

So why was he so happy? I wondered. It could hardly be the money - his gross pay of £235 ($381, €274) a week is a 10th of what he used to make. But even that, he said, didn't bother him. His kids had left home and he had some savings from his old job. He thought it a fair rate for the job and told me that the previous week he had made some overtime and felt rich because he could buy a takeaway pizza out of the extra.

He explained that what he really liked about the job was that it was healthy. Four hours spent walking was an inherently happier way of spending one's time than four hours sitting on one's bottom. Maybe; yet to me lugging a bag up and down the stairs of dismal council flats still didn't seem like a recipe for happiness.

He said he also liked the contact with the people - when you deliver people's mail you get to know a good deal about them. But this wasn't a proper answer either. There is no time for a modern postman to do much more than say "morning!" and pass on swiftly.

But then he said something that made more sense. His new job had allowed him to reclaim his mind. When he goes home at 1pm every day he does not have to give work another thought till 7.30am the next day. In his old job, worries from the office took up permanent residence in his head, making his synapses too ragged to allow him to focus properly on anything else.

And then I started to realise why he loves this job so much. It has nothing to do with how nice it is to be a postman in absolute terms but how nice it is relative to being a senior manager. He enjoys lugging his big bag because he knows what the alternative is. He knows how wretched it is spending your working life trying to get people to do things they don't want to do and bearing responsibility for things that you can't change. The only good things about being a top manager are status and money; if you ignore those, then being a postman is a much nicer way of passing the time. At 56, he said he had got beyond status, and as he had a small pile of savings, he was ready to be a manual worker.

The Japanese know all about this. There are plenty of older people who do manual work - any work is seen as better than no work - and there is nothing especially demeaning about being downwardly mobile at the end of one's life.

This seems to me a perfectly good way of ending ones career: doing redeeming manual work almost as a hobby, subsidised by savings from fatter times. The model has one fatal flaw: the jobs are being taken away from younger people who might enjoy the work less, but who, alas, need the money more.

[norbert]

Is this some sort of carefully selected propaganda ?

[Night Tonic]

If you're overly suspicious anything will seem like propaganda but I know people who had high-powered jobs and fast cars and dumped them for a job without the 24 hour responsibility.

Early in my working life I spent a year in an engineering shop. The work was monotonous, days and sometimes weeks carrying out the same actions on a fly press or a bench drill but it was also the one job I had that didn't involve any stress and we had many laughs. Lot to be said for peace of mind. Come in, do your job and go home.

It is only a job after all.

[DGP1]

Obviously not in my office and anyone who comes on this site after their days work to just shows that we don't just turn off after work but at least it's not like that woman who spent the days either fishing letters out of the sea or sleeping in the local lay bys (not to mention freezing cats that she run over).

[norbert]

If you're overly suspicious anything will seem like propaganda but I know people who had high-powered jobs and fast cars and dumped them for a job without the 24 hour responsibility.

Early in my working life I spent a year in an engineering shop. The work was monotonous, days and sometimes weeks carrying out the same actions on a fly press or a bench drill but it was also the one job I had that didn't involve any stress and we had many laughs. Lot to be said for peace of mind. Come in, do your job and go home.

It is only a job after all.

Yes it is possible & plausible but it's also possible to be beyond the realms of coincidence . The FT is also a Murdoch paper , their papers are well versed in the black arts . As for paranoia , the powers that be tend to be that way .

[stokes11eg]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5fefc3a0-6f43 ... ck_check=1

A postman picks up a letter from a pile, looks at the address and slowly puts it into a pigeonhole. Then he takes another and repeats the process. Nearby, a group of colleagues stand watching him. They are worried about him as they can see things aren't quite right. Later, they discover that he has been threatened by a violent thug and so pay the thug a visit and spray him with red paint. Job done, the biggest of them - fondly known as "Meatballs" - triumphantly explains the reason for his heroism: "I'm a f***ing postman!"

A few days after I watched this unlikely scene from Looking for Eric, Ken Loach's new comedy, I heard the same words repeated by an acquaintance at a garden party in Oxfordshire - though this time without the expletive.

The last time I'd seen this man he was the marketing director of a business that sold organic TV dinners. But since then his company had been sold to a multinational and, after a brief spell as a consultant to the new buyer, he had been eased out altogether.Yes. Once upon a time--------in a land far away, ther e was a postman------

For a while he had looked for similar work but discovered that in a recession no one wants to pay an unemployed 56-year-old a six-figure salary to work in marketing. So he thought again and decided to try his hand at the job that he had wanted to do ever since he was a boy. He looked at me triumphantly. "I'm a postman," he said.

"Blimey," I said. "What's it like?" He said it was quite the best job he'd ever had.

And then I thought of the film, and wondered if Loach was right after all. Was there a special camaraderie among men who put letters through the holes in doors? Or was the less sentimental US view of postmen more accurate - that they are less likely to help their colleagues than to kill them? In the 1980s and 1990s there was a spate of nasty incidents in US post offices where workers went nuts and started shooting workmates - as a result of which there is the special expression "to go postal" to describe anyone who gets uncontrollably angry at work.

My acquaintance confirmed that his fellow postmen were neither terribly nice nor terribly nasty. There was no heart-warming camaraderie; instead there was a mild hostility caused by the fact that he works part time and they resent part timers. He pitches up at a relatively leisurely 7.30am to deliver the letters that full timers have already been sorting for two hours.

Morale, in any case, was quite low. The business is contracting at about 10 per cent a year. And postmen are now being forced to walk faster and deliver back-breaking quantities of junk mail.

So why was he so happy? I wondered. It could hardly be the money - his gross pay of £235 ($381, €274) a week is a 10th of what he used to make. But even that, he said, didn't bother him. His kids had left home and he had some savings from his old job. He thought it a fair rate for the job and told me that the previous week he had made some overtime and felt rich because he could buy a takeaway pizza out of the extra.

He explained that what he really liked about the job was that it was healthy. Four hours spent walking was an inherently happier way of spending one's time than four hours sitting on one's bottom. Maybe; yet to me lugging a bag up and down the stairs of dismal council flats still didn't seem like a recipe for happiness.

He said he also liked the contact with the people - when you deliver people's mail you get to know a good deal about them. But this wasn't a proper answer either. There is no time for a modern postman to do much more than say "morning!" and pass on swiftly.

But then he said something that made more sense. His new job had allowed him to reclaim his mind. When he goes home at 1pm every day he does not have to give work another thought till 7.30am the next day. In his old job, worries from the office took up permanent residence in his head, making his synapses too ragged to allow him to focus properly on anything else.

And then I started to realise why he loves this job so much. It has nothing to do with how nice it is to be a postman in absolute terms but how nice it is relative to being a senior manager. He enjoys lugging his big bag because he knows what the alternative is. He knows how wretched it is spending your working life trying to get people to do things they don't want to do and bearing responsibility for things that you can't change. The only good things about being a top manager are status and money; if you ignore those, then being a postman is a much nicer way of passing the time. At 56, he said he had got beyond status, and as he had a small pile of savings, he was ready to be a manual worker.

The Japanese know all about this. There are plenty of older people who do manual work - any work is seen as better than no work - and there is nothing especially demeaning about being downwardly mobile at the end of one's life.

This seems to me a perfectly good way of ending ones career: doing redeeming manual work almost as a hobby, subsidised by savings from fatter times. The model has one fatal flaw: the jobs are being taken away from younger people who might enjoy the work less, but who, alas, need the money more.

[norbert]

laid on a bit too thick ?

[junkmale]

It's certainly an odd piece; with no real conclusion. They're trying to say something..but what?

[k979aaa]

It seams the FT journo's are at a lose end and have a hard time justifying their salaries and fast car's and are trying badly to make the humble postman their scape goat for all the problems of the govenment the spiv's who read their rag and and the editor who pays hard cash for the trash they scribe with their idle pens and pristine keyboards!. When is a real FT journalist going to earn his/her crust and do the job and not for a week nor a day but for a year and do some real work for a change!.

[axeman]

As craziers got enough of our money i'm sure he'd want to give up all that bullying (oops sorry 'worrying) perhaps a change of direction wouldn't go unoticed perhaps a binman as he's a rubbish ''leader''

[k979aaa]

As craziers got enough of our money i'm sure he'd want to give up all that bullying (oops sorry 'worrying) perhaps a change of direction wouldn't go unoticed perhaps a binman as he's a rubbish ''leader''

He :cfo is not a fit and proper person to be let on my property as such release the hounds!. :cfo :cfo :cfo

[dvbuk55]

Obviously not in my office and anyone who comes on this site after their days work to just shows that we don't just turn off after work but at least it's not like that woman who spent the days either fishing letters out of the sea or sleeping in the local lay bys (not to mention freezing cats that she run over).

My first thoughts as well though she only managed a few years. Why don't we all do demeaning manual labour at the end of our working life for a pittance and feel oh so grateful, hang on a minute, that's me! Well all apart from the grateful bit. There are some things still to be grateful for but working isn't one of them - I've often wondered what I will do when I do retire.............. and the answer is..........whatever the wife tells me to do.

[opgpat]

He probablly loved the managerial job at the begining too. It's quite normal to enjoy the postie job as a newbie too, here's why:

- you're put on an easy 'training' round so you have lighter bags and a shorter, probablly more pleasant, walk than most
- managers make sure your frame is well prepped so you get out in good time to complete duty
- managers give you an easy time over how long you are taking to complete delivery and are happy to pay you overtime
- you have no specials to take out for first 6weeks and driver may be generous with taking more packets for you

Ask your friend again in a year if he still loves the job. With heavy bags killing your knees and back, having to rush round to finish on time, managers staring at you while you prep and refusing to pay for your overtime the job is often not strees free OR one you forget when you go home.

[stokes11eg]

EH!!!opgpat----Never, in our office at least,have newbies been given easy walks etc, just the reverse!
In r4eal life-the worst walk-*(S)being new ,you stupidly agree in the first instance to overtime,with false promises of the other walk being prepped up,Ha.Ha.So even in the far flung days of long ago, you'd be on the streets until late afternoon~
As for no specials, and kindly packet men, Ha.Ha>ha,.hoe long have you been with 'THE FIRM"?

[dvbuk55]

EH!!!opgpat----Never, in our office at least,have newbies been given easy walks etc, just the reverse!
In r4eal life-the worst walk-*(S)being new ,you stupidly agree in the first instance to overtime,with false promises of the other walk being prepped up,Ha.Ha.So even in the far flung days of long ago, you'd be on the streets until late afternoon~
As for no specials, and kindly packet men, Ha.Ha>ha,.hoe long have you been with 'THE FIRM"?

Actually he is right in some respects, there does seem to be a sort of pecking order for part timers - I've noticed that a few times new starters are put on "part duties" - duties which are being developed and are then left on those duties seemingly forever - whilst other part timers are buggered about from ars*hole to breakfast time. Of course it shouldn't happen because the union should have input on how duties are created but in the real world the managers suit themselves.