I worked as a postman for a bit. I'd wake up at 0430, make a short commute, then sort letters into street/house number order for something like 3 hours. After the first few days this became mindnumbingly dull. It was obvious 90% of what I was about to deliver would go straight in the bin so all this drudgery wad largely pointless. For a while I worked in a pretty rough area (by UK standards, admittedly nowhere in the UK is really that dangerous compared to much of the world), and on several occasions I was harassed by members of the public. Though later I worked in a much nicer area and people were nice to me.
I suspect the main thing about the story isn't how great it is to be a mailman, but how great it is to be good at people. I work from home and live in quite a nice community, but I only know a handful of people. This is basically because unless I have a common interest with someone I don't really have anything to say for myself. Clearly not something that afflicts Floyd!
To help foster more local connections, I've started inviting everyone I know (plus everyone they know) to Saturday morning kickball. It has been a great way to bring different groups of people together and create/strengthen bonds in our community. Plus, it starts the day with being outdoors which I think is good for the soul.
That's awesome. I played kickball in an adult league for a bit after college (on the DC mall no less) and it was great. I'd probably drink less nowadays...
>Spread love wherever you go, to everybody, anytime.
Sometimes that really fucking hard. And I know I'm part of the problem. But if that's not what we're all working for, we might as well just give up now.
Some of this is tied up in wishful thinking I’m sure, but focus on the macro and not the micro. I don’t think any of us can be the best version of ourselves without learning from the worst versions of ourselves. I’m sure that mailman had bad encounters; if not player 1 alert.
It's amazing how many times people will stop to say hello when a small child says hello to them. We got invited into someone's garden last weekend to feed their chickens.
Admittedly we live in a more rural area. Might not work so well on the mean streets of London.
There's no doubt lots of people are closely connected to their local community through kids friends, their kids schools, their kids sports teams, etc. But having kids only as a means to talk to people would be a bit drastic!
Well I did also have kids so I wouldn't look so dodgy hanging around by the play equipment in the park, so it wasn't just as a means to speak to people ;)
Ha! I went to the Lego store once pre child and got excited about the advent calendars. The man next to me asked how old my child was, I had to admit that I didn't have one.
Wow, their financial statements are fascinating. I encourage anyone with an interest to take a look for themselves. Your statement is correct in that they do not directly receive cash from the government. However, they do borrow from the FFB at an insanely low rate of 1.785%, which one could consider a subsidy. It’s very interesting to note also that they have a legal maximum debt load of $15B which they are currently at. Their MD&A states that liquidity could soon become a huge issue. Management pretty much sums up the situation with this statement “legal restrictions on pricing, service diversification and operations restrict our ability to cover our costs to provide secure, reliable and affordable postal services to the nation.”
My 2nd ever comment on hacker news, and already someone has managed to segue from my innoncuous comment into an attack on feminism. And further more, they've done so by using a video of someone with schizophrenia, or some other serious psychological problem.
>My 2nd ever comment on hacker news, and already someone has managed to segue from my innoncuous comment into an attack on feminism.
No. They were trying to empathize with your previous point that working and dealing with the public is an exceedingly difficult thing to do.
They could have picked a better video to do so, but they picked one that was a viral meme that was everywhere a few years ago. It went viral because of the terrible behavior of the person towards the mail carrier -- feminism is only mentioned because whoever reposted the video on YouTube for the umpteenth time decided to title the video with regards to the dialog that the person is spouting towards the mail carrier -- dialog which has to do with gender, stalking, etc.
I'm not qualified to diagnose the person in the video as a schizophrenic, so I didn't. I'm not calling her a feminist, because she didn't call herself that. Some guy who posted a YouTube video inserted that narrative about feminism, and you inserted the narrative about schizophrenia.
This could have been a video of a mail carrier receiving any kind of abuse from the public and the parents post who you replied to would have had the same message as they intended with this one -- mail carriers receive a lot of abuse from the public.
With all that said : I hope you stick around. There is good discourse here.
Oh, please stick around! You may note that the complaining comment (not your comment, but the one you're referring to) was not only downvoted but flagged and "dead" (hidden unless you enable "showdead" in your account settings).
I really appreciated your comments and I think a lot of other people did too.
I suspect the main thing about the story isn't how great it is to be a mailman, but how great it is to be good at people. I work from home and live in quite a nice community, but I only know a handful of people. This is basically because unless I have a common interest with someone I don't really have anything to say for myself. Clearly not something that afflicts Floyd!