Postal Ninja

Dreams Come Wrapped in Odd Packaging

Image by the author with assistance by Nano Banana 2

I think back to when I was little, my father teaching us yoga. He would put his outstretched legs over his head and then drop them down until his nose kissed his knees. My siblings and I imitated best we could.

Then we’d sit in a circle and he’d ask us our goals. We were 8, 10, and 13.

“Nothing short-term,” he would say. “Long-term, like, where would you like to be in twenty years? What would you like to be doing?”

My older brother wanted to be a pro baseball player.

“And you, Jay?”

I knew how much my father made, owning three convenient stores. It had afforded us the huge home on the lake where we lived, though he always refused to admit that we may be rich.

“A doctor,” I lied.

There was a pert nod in my direction as he queried my little sister. But her answer was lost to memory, because I was thinking about what I really wanted to be.

A ninja.

8:00 PM. Late Fall. Darkness Has Fallen.

My 2021 Mercedes Metris, bearing a dented blue eagle on its side, sat idling in the gravel lot at the rear of a trailer park. Its hazard lights blinked rhythmically, casting a desperate amber glow against the skeletal trees.

Using a headlamp mounted to a sweaty Velcro strap, I tried to read the labels on the nearest of sixty packages crammed into the back of the van.

It was a total disaster.

The mess was a direct result of missed turns, mislabeled scan codes, and my own complete ignorance of postal organization. Actually, using the word organization is a massive stretch. Just because people and things operate in the same general vicinity, should we call it an organization?

That night, I decided the United States Postal Service would be far more honest if it renamed itself a Dis-Organization. As far as I could tell, the scanners didn’t work, the vehicles were dangerously out of service, and management regularly handed carriers parcels meant for completely different zip codes.

I was fed up. And right on cue, it started to rain — cold and slanting.

8:15 PM. Late Fall. Cold Rain Slicing the Dirt Road.

Through the gray spray, headlights cut the dark. I watched them bob and dodge potholes, finally sliding to a stop just behind my van.

The driver’s door of his also-mangled clone of my truck popped open. A short, wiry figure leapt out into the storm. In his slick black raincoat, he looked exactly like a raven’s wing cutting through the drizzle. It was Eric, an experienced Rural Carrier Associate (RCA) sent to help deliver what I couldn’t finish.

Backlit by yellow headlamps, Eric sidled alongside me and eyed my chaotic cargo. Beneath the curve of his baseball cap, I could see he was young — maybe twenty-five, clean-shaven. I couldn’t quite catch his eyes in the shadows. He listened silently while I fumbled through a string of excuses, frantically trying to arrange things so it didn’t look like I’d just thrown everything into the truck that morning.

Without a word, he started grabbing packages, rotating them seamlessly to read the labels.

Sort. Move. Stack.

I heard a faint snicker at some of my complaints, and a quiet “uh-huh” here and there. Then, he began toting piles of boxes back to his own truck, throwing them onto the front seat. Before I could even process what was happening, half of my workload was gone.

He pointed a finger toward the dark depths of the trailer park.

“You’re just gonna circle around there. When you come out, your first address will be on your right.”

I climbed into my driver’s seat and shut the door, looking out at him like a wounded doe.

“I’ll call ya,” he yelled over the storm.

Bang.

He slapped the aluminum side of my van and ran back into the downpour. Beside my seat, my first package sat perfectly arranged on the tray. He’d done that, too. Damn. I flipped on the wipers, switched off my headlamp, and threw the van into drive. He thundered past as I pulled up to my first drop.

I imagined he was giving me the bird.

8:35 PM. Late Fall. Boiling over.

Twenty minutes passed. I had turned around twice, swearing I’d missed a street sign, only to realize the address I was hunting for wasn’t even on my route.

Frustration boiled over. Just as I was about to chuck the package at the passenger window with glass-shattering force, my phone rang. At that exact second, I looked at the next address label, then at the mailbox to my right. They matched.

What’s the chances? Well, that would make ten packages down.

I answered the call.

“What address are you at?” came Eric’s voice — lithe, lively, and completely unfazed.

I bristled, suddenly feeling guilty for being so pissed off.

“You know what? Never mind. I see you.” His headlights grew in my side mirror. He’d already hung up.

I jumped out and delivered the parcel in the pouring rain, my scanner beeping and farting as I frantically tried to dry the screen on my shirt. While I fumbled on the doorstep, I glanced back at the road. He was already off-loading more of my packages.

I paused. Had this kid really delivered twenty-five parcels in the time it took me to do ten?

How?

I shook the fucking scanner and slapped it against my thigh. Just then, the homeowner opened the door, spilling a sheet of white light onto the porch and over my embarrassed face. The scanner finally beeped. Some freak of nature, but it had grabbed the bar-code.

“Thank you,” Came the women’s voice from over my shoulder as I beat a retreat back into the rain toward Eric.

He had already loaded all but six packages from my truck into his. He’d left those six in perfect numerical order on my tray.

From under his cap, he gave me the next directive:

“Right at the next street, and the address will be on your right.”

Then, he was enveloped by the raven’s wing once more, disappearing behind his windshield under the orange glow of his dome light. This time, I just moved out of his way. Six parcels left. Had he really taken twenty more boxes? Christ. I actually started to get nervous that I wouldn’t even be able to handle these measly six.

But I went at it, racing as safely as possible through the slick streets. I kept the scanner tucked under my shirt like a football to keep the rain from sending it haywire.

I read the address for my final drop, and then came the ding of a text.

DONE. YOU GOOD?

WTF, I thought. I typed back a little white lie.

YES, DONE. THANK YOU!

This guy was a straight-up postal ninja!

He shot me a thumbs-up emoji.

ANYTIME.

The Reality of the Route

Slowly, the memory of that night faded among the hundreds of identical shifts that followed, day after day.

Until today.

Have your adult children ever called you just to say “I’m sorry” or “Thank you” after they’ve gotten married, or undergone that massive shift into real adulthood? Guilt grabbing them for being so unappreciative?

Surviving at the post office as an RCA for more than a year feels exactly like that.

At first, you don’t realize it, because you spend most of your late nights muttering,

“I hate new people.”

But eventually, you look back. You remember someone smiling, or laughing, or just plain taking the absolute beating that your utter incompetence was giving them. And then… yeah. It becomes like that.

You get it.

This realization is probably when most postal workers think they should go into management. You suddenly wish there was a way to mass-educate the greenhorns:

• Write your sequence numbers in the correct orientation.
• Pull down into your DPS.
• Do not rely on the scanner’s GPS when doing Amazon drops.
• Smite the regulars until they give you the gate codes and the actual addresses to the CBUs.

And oh yeah: “Get your key from a clerk because mine has been lost for two years.”

In fact, don’t rely on any tool the post office gives you. They wouldn’t be hiring associates if their internal tools actually worked.

Facts. Put your shit in order, and if you don’t see where to go next, tell Google to take you there. Simple as that.

The truth is, everything at the post office is broken. The only things that function in this industry (I still refuse to say organization) are the people. And if those people rely on the junk they are given to “help” them do their jobs, the people break, too.

Many of them have. “Going Postal” is real ladies and gentlemen.

There’s a reason it found its way to the title of a Terry Pratchett novel. Delivery is an inherently weird concept that probably shouldn’t exist — but society demands it, so it does.

(By the way, Moist von Lipwig likely got his name from the summer heat, and snails genuinely love envelope glue. So don’t call us snail mail because we’re slower than lightspeed e-mail. It’s because of all the damn snails! Besides, we’re quicker than the clacks. Well, some of us are. Not the new guys.)

3:00 PM. Mid-Summer. Blistering Heat.

Flash forward. The seasons change, but the grind stays the same. The winter chill is gone, replaced by a ruthless mid-summer sun beating down on the roof of my LLV (Aluminum Box-looking Mail Truck), turning the cabin into an absolute furnace.

Now, I am the one doing the saving.

The new guy was waiting for me at a stop on route W12 with the other half of our load. I had delivered eighty-three stops; he had managed twenty.

Over my shoulder, he lamented about how his scanner took him twenty minutes away to an address that didn’t exist, and how the next stop forced him twenty minutes back, only to realize it was a house one street over from where he started.

Meanwhile, my hands were moving automatically — turning boxes, organizing piles, moving bunches of parcels to my front seat.

“Don’t use the scanner GPS,” I said. “I haven’t used it in a year. By the time it calculates the route, you could have walked to the next address. Just look at the package, and if you don’t know the road, Google it.”

It probably went straight over his head.

Before long, I had knocked out forty more parcels and was texting him for a new meeting location. Lo and behold, there were his hazards up ahead. I whipped in behind him and started unloading his truck, taking more than half.

Thirty minutes later, I did text him while mixing Gatorade Zero powder into a water bottle. His reply popped up:

OK. 2101 PINE AVE. YOU'RE FREAKING FAST!

It was two minutes away. A brief window of time — just long enough for me to remember Eric, who has since transitioned from a “postal ninja” into one of our stupervisors.

When I pulled up and relieved the new guy of his remaining parcels, I paused. I thought long and hard about how to explain efficiency to him. Was I, or anyone, ever going to break this manic cycle of turnover slag?

Because that’s what it is: a constant, brutal barrage of undertrained, ill-advised new hires thrown into the deep end. Maybe it really just takes six months of suffering to learn how to manage unknown variables. I still get thrown onto routes I’ve never seen three times a week. But I handle them better now.

Perhaps I do it with just as many expletives and violent personal outbursts, but I do it efficiently.

3:45 PM. Mid-Summer. The Secondary Rescue.

Fifteen minutes later, I was completely done with him. I didn’t even bother sending a DONE! YOU GOOD? text. I just called my boss and asked who else needed help.

They sent me twenty minutes north to another new guy. This one had completed a grand total of ten stops in the time it took me to do 120.

“I started late,” he stammered, sweat stinging his eyes as he stared at his muddy boots under the blinding summer sun, “and there were just so many packages.”

This is the part of the job that makes me think of Will Smith in Bad Boys, arguing with Marcus because he’s always the first one in the office and the last one to leave, despite being a trust-fund baby.

Only here, the metric is warped:

If you are the first one done, you are guaranteed to be the last one to leave. Management treats giving you extra hours like it’s a compliment.

Come in, be the most competent carrier on the road, and we will reward you by sending you to stay and work with the least competent one.

They tell you hard work pays off. But as a writer, I prefer to get my hard work done fast so I can go home to my long work. Not the other way around.

If I spend all day out there lollygagging, listening to a malfunctioning piece of government plastic tell me where to steer my truck, I would be out there all day and all night. I’d get home with zero time left to write.

You can’t rush writing. There are no shortcuts on the page. If there were, I’d be formatting my next novel right now instead of writing articles. But when you are trading your life to the post office, who has the mental bandwidth to keep a creative thread alive?

If everyone were efficient, maybe we’d all go home early. But that would mean they weren’t new, wouldn’t it?

Sometimes I think I’m in some kind of purgatory where I’m hating on past versions of myself.

Swapping hours for raw dollars is the absolute pits. I know some people accept it. Maybe they even enjoy it, relishing the chance to sit out there following false GPS leads, listening to podcasts, or chatting on the phone.

But what ever happened to ambition?

I’m forty-five years old. To me, ambition is still the only thing that makes life worth living. Maybe it’s because my kids live with my ex-wife, and my limited weekend visits and holidays leave me with empty rooms and a lonely house to chase that ambition. Maybe that ambition gives me a desperate shred of hope that I’ll win them back one day.

Maybe it’s just dreams.

Or maybe I’m just too damn stupid to feel the whip cracking across my back. Too damn ignorant to accept my place. Too damn cowardly to just jump into the unknown? Your books will sell, Jay! Just go for it!

But then there is always the threat of becoming a deadbeat dad. One who doesn’t pay child support, or can’t visit, or lets down his own mom who survives on social security alone…

6:30 PM. Mid-Summer. Back at Office.

The relentless self-talk continued until I had finished delivering forty-five more parcels and called into the office.

“All’s good out there. Just scan out this barcode and head back,” the supervisor said.

My phone dinged with a picture of the tracking number.

Ten minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot to unload. Tucked away inside a plastic tub, I found a missed parcel. It must have fallen from a shelf, landing perfectly flat so that I stacked an empty bin right on top of it.

I sighed.

“Just go out and scan it for tomorrow,” the boss said, much to my relief.

So I did, knowing it would be one more piece for the regular carrier to deliver tomorrow— the brutal Monday after a holiday, where three days’ worth of backed-up mail await. But I had the same fate waiting for me.

As I walked back into the station, the new guy was just pulling in.

7:00 PM. Mid-Summer. Headed Home to Write.

I clocked out, ditched the scanner, re-raked my keys, and filled out my time card. I headed straight for the door.

“Hey man!”

The new guy lifted his hand in a bro-grip. I clasped it, returning the shake, completely exhausted.

“You’re a freakin’ postal ninja, Bro! I don’t even understand how you do that!”

The words went right over my head. I just smiled and said, “Anytime.”

I didn’t truly hear what he said until I was halfway home, the narrator of Pet Sematary droning through my car speakers.

My father had asked us what we wanted to be in twenty years. I had lied and said a doctor, while secretly wishing to be a ninja. It took me nearly four decades to realize that some long-term goals come gift-wrapped in incredibly odd packaging.

Sometimes we’re afraid to bust the fragile Amazon tape on the package, and see what there really is in life to be thankful for.

The post office hadn’t crushed my ambition; it had tested it, sharpened it, and proven it was unbreakable. I might be on a daily drive through purgatory. But I can still write my own ending.

Though there are those three days worth of mail to tackle tomorrow.

Dive into the audiobooks and free library resources of Jay Horne, an author with 20 years of creative storytelling. Don’t miss his award-winning novel, The Death of Science.

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