Man. If any of you wonder why mail folks seem so pissed off all of the time, well....let me enlighten you folks.
The "management" of the Postal Service is a direct contradiction in terms, kind of like "military intelligence."
I am a mail carrier during the "day" in Dallas, Texas. I hate my job with a passion. So likely does YOUR mail carrier. Why? Because the "management" treats mail carriers like twice-stomped dog shit in the yard. And then they wonder why carriers have bad attitudes and piss poor morale.
I should digress a bit. Allow me to concede that that there have been TWO (yes, TWO) supervisors I have worked for that I liked and somewhat respected as supervisors, and respected further as human beings but just wasn't impressed by their management ability on the whole. Names are irrelevant. I say I wasn't impressed by their ability to the extent that their abilities to close the paper trails were lacking. They did, however, possess superior people skills compared to most others.
This opinion has been formed over the ten total years I have working for the US Mail.
I shall now move on to my current situation.
I have been at the Pleasant Grove Station of the Dallas district of the USPS for about 2 1/2 years. During that time I have seen the district change supervisors and district managers as often as some folks change their socks.
Some of these moves were good moves, but some were not. We just has a tenured supervisor (one of the two I liked) booted from our station because, in my opinion, she just wasn't BITCH enough. In her place we received two more who leave SO MUCH to be desired. See, it seems that the way to get promoted in management at the USPS is to be as much of a miserable asshole as possible. Period. Results be damned. Accuracy be damned. Enron could have taken a lesson from the upper eschelon of the Dallas district in how to "cook" the books. Indeed. Mistake one for the Postal Service:
I'm not exactly sure of the chronology of the timeline involved, but maybe some of you older employees could shed some light on this next point.
The Postal Service decided to make supervisory positions "performance-based", meaning that supervisors, station managers, district managers, etc., are paid according to "numbers." (Rimshot!)
Huh? Um, the Postal Service is a PROTECTED MONOPOLY as has been so since its' inception. It is NOT a competitive entity. When Congress opened up the parcel business to competitors back when, you saw companies like Federal Express, United Parcel Service, etc., spring to life instantaneously. Why? Because the Postal Service couldn't keep up with an expanding global marketplace and the volumes that were coming. Even now, in the Post Office they talk about "taking back" the parcel business. What a joke. Even if the USPS on the whole saw a 10% increase daily in parcel volume the whole operation would open up like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall. There's no way the USPS could manage that. The entire delivery operation is designed around the status quo. They could not adapt. To truly be competitive you have to adapt. Why can't they, you ask? I'll tell you. Because of interpersonal relations and work relationships between management and workers.
As of now I can safely say that here in Dallas they are worst I have seen them for multitude of reasons, way too long to list here. But allow me to give you a current example of the shenanigans now taking place in my office.
I am one of a handful of limited duty carriers in my office. I have a ruptured disc in my back and neck, and a eroded bony condition in my knee which caused my ACL to detach from my lower knee joint and resulted in bony fragments grinding away soft tissues inside of my knee. Surgery is probably going to be the final solution for that, and that knee will never be the same again. Thanks to the good ol' USPS for pushing me like a mule all of these years by having me work 10-12 hours a day with 9-11 hours of that being distance walking. That many hours? Yes! Indeed. I am a regular now but was a casual, then PTF, then regular. Back in the late 80s and early 90s I was a TE carrier in Garland where they worked me like Kunte Kinte everyday too. And I was gung-ho. I wanted to make them happy and carry every 3996 as fast as I could. I carried all that heavy-ass Dallas Morning News and ADVO sometimes 5 DAYS A WEEK! 40-50 lbs. of paper hanging off my shoulder that many days a week over that many years finally ruptured discs in my back and neck.
When my knee exploded I was carrying a route every day in Pleasant Grove that was over 24 miles of walking. Yes. I walked it off several times with a pedometer. I don't walk like that anymore, nor do I suspend any weight off my neck. And I have migraines now that are likely attributed to the upper spinal column damage done to my neck by repeated exposure to excessive weight over a period of years. But while I was fully functional I was a mail carrying MACHINE. Indeed.
I work in that office now as a light duty carrier. And as the other limited duty folks in the office are finding, I now find that with this new management change we have seen the rekindling of the light duty employee harassment fires that so frequently burn in this USPS. Badgering, threats, harassment, etc. Everyday we are having to put up with new shenanigans designed to make us so angry that we explode.
They threaten to AWOL us when we have our DOL doctors appointments, threaten us with AWOL if we call in sick for whatever reason, and then try to get us to work outside of our restrictions and then threaten to write us up if we don't. Not to mention holding us to impossible time standards that are not usually even attainable to those without all of our injuries. As a result of my injuries I just can't get around as fast or work the same. I can't cover the same distances nor can I stand for as long at a stretch. My restrictions spell out completely what I should and should not attempt to do during the course of a day and "Management" continues to distribute to us "light duty assignments" that continue to violate our restrictions and then they get a case of the ass when we refuse the assignments based on our CA17 restrictions.
As a result our union stewards stay very busy in our office. But there's much more.
Aside from the light duty harassment and threats and the latest AWOL harassment and threats I have tolerated from these idiots, I came to find today that another carrier in my office WITNESSED one of the newer "supervisors" (who is a perpetual 204b because he can't even be an asshole right), RAID my locker in the locker room at the office and REMOVE all my rain gear (hat, boots, overshoes, pants, rainjacket) as well as my mail satchel and a pair of my SHOES and distribute this gear to other carriers who have been routinely brought in from other stations and assignments (like collections) to carry helpslips and routes in our station. I was gone that day on leave because of transportation problems. I only discovered that my gear was gone today because it was raining and I obviously went to retrieve my gear only to find all of it GONE. I then came out to one of the other supervisors to report a THIEF in the office and that's when this other carrier informing me of the guilty supervisor's thieving ways.
WHAT!?!?!?! WTF?!! What right does this idiot have to go in MY LOCKER and retrieve MY GEAR to distribute to other carriers? MY UNIFORM ALLOWANCE paid for all of that stuff, and all the rain gear was brand new! Arggghh! And this supervisor actually admitted to me that he raided my locker and gave my stuff away with a shit-eatin' grin on his face. Bastard. As a result of that I had to carry mail in the pouring down rain with no rain shoes and no rain pants. I had a second rain jacket in my car, fortunately. But I was all wet all day and my feet were numb and without sensation until I got back to the office and didn't thaw out until way after I got home. THIS SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED! This idiot stole my gear and I am now going to go the the District Manager and Postmaster myself on this. In addition to that they are going to see a flurry of grievances and EEO's based on the other crap they've pulled.
Now then, so many other carriers are having to endure this same type of harassment and work related stress just as I am. No wonder morale sucks so bad.
This sucks. There was a time where I actually liked my job. I did. I'm sure most other carriers would say that too. But now I can't stand it because of the morons I have to put up with everyday. I dread even getting out of bed in the morning and putting that stupid blue nylon monkey suit on. It wasn't always that way.
Never mind that my injuries I have sustained was because for years I was BUSTING MY ASS for the Postal Service so they could make their "numbers".
They got their bonuses and I got debilitating conditions for the rest of my life. So the next time they give my grief about my restrictions I may just give them the proverbial bird in the face.
So to speak. We keep fighting the fight but it's not without negative consequence all around.
This Postal Service could realize so much potential if they'd just get rid of the assholes and actually hire some folks that know who to manage a business.
I have ideas on how to do that. I have ideas on managing people. I did so for years. Everything I see Postal Supervisors do goes against every bit of management training I ever underwent for the companies I worked for. That's because they have no real clues, and the USPS is at fault for not adequately training people. They just throw them into the fray and expect impossible results.
All the while the mail carriers take the beating.
That's why your carrier seems so pissed off all of the time.
Now you know.
Other things I'll cover later but I'm just tired of writing.

posted by Dave @ 11:49 PM

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