Hi
I just got out of highschool, and I am looking at careers that might suit me. I know I want a college degree (an associates would be just fine for me) and other than being an antique dealer/historian, or stereo salesman, the only other job that interests me is being a postman. I was wondering about how the pay is, (at our post office they are hiring rural carriers for 14.85 an hour) if it would be better to be in the city carrier, and what places in the country need postmen (or women). What kind of benefits do you get?
Thanks,
Ben
All I know is, be prepared to fill out an inch thick stack of paper work.
Deb
The pay is good–if you’re a regular letter carrier who’s on the Overtime Desired list, you can pull down $50,000 a year.
Downside to that–you’re carrying mail 6 days a week (because if you’re on the Overtime Desired list you invariably get called in on what’s laughably entitled your “day off”), and you’re carrying mail until 6 at night, sometimes 7 or 7:30 in the summer, until it starts to get dark–union rules prohibit the delivering of mail after dark, due to all those heavily-armed, pit-bull-owning and paranoid American homeowners out there, who, when they hear footsteps on the porch after sunset, tend to shoot first, then sic the dog, and only then inquire as to whether it might only be the mailman.
So the point is, be prepared to have no family life in exchange for that $50,000 a year. No weekends, only Sundays.
Rural carriers use their own cars, spend a LOT of time in them. This is only for you if you like to drive all day every day.
The benefits are decent–you can choose either GEHA (governmental) or Blue Cross for health insurance.
You get a certain number of paid vacation days per year. You earn sick leave. They also now offer “family sick leave”, which is where you can use your own sick leave to stay home with sick children (or other family members).
After you have enough seniority, you can bid on certain routes, so you deliver the same route every day. If you’re lucky, you can deliver your own mail, and go home for lunch every day.
Downside to this–until you have seniority, you get stuck with every Shit Detail mail route in the city, in the kind of neighborhoods where teenage prostitutes hang out on the front porches and say, “Hey, mailman…” in sultry voices, and guys come up to you with shoplifted steaks under their coats and ask, “Wanna buy some meat?” (true stories)
After you’re hired at Post Office A, and say you want to transfer to Post Office B, say in another city, you can do that–but only IF you’re prepared to wait, sometimes for months. Say you’re delivering mail in Milwaukee and you want to move to Terre Haute, Indiana and deliver mail there, well, you put your name on Terre Haute’s list, and if they have a route open up, they’ll call you.
It takes a while to get hired on in the first place. It isn’t like where you go down to McDonalds and fill out a form and they say, “Yeah, come in next Monday.” First you study for the Test (which involves practicing memorizing zip codes and street addresses), then you take the Test, then you wait. The Better Half had to wait for 18 months before he got a call-back for an interview (“This Is Not A Job Offer”, they stressed.)
Then if you do get called back for an actual interview, and if they do decide to hire you, you have a 90-day probation period. And yes, there are people who, after all that, still flunk out on day 89 (one of them drove her 13-foot-high mail truck under a 12-foot-high overhang, opened it up like a sardine tin–she was out.)
So, actually, if you play your cards right, and don’t screw up, or screw around, it’s total job security. No strikes, no layoffs (there has never been a layoff at the Post Office). The only way you can screw up and get fired is by basically being a totally stupid jerk and not doing your work (or by stealing mail, which is even stupider). Keep your head down, do your work, and you’re set till whenever you wanna retire.
–There are only a couple of *eeensy-weensy * catches.
[ul]
[li] You have to put up with the clueless antics of Management.[/li][li] You have to put up with the equally clueless antics of Labor (the National Association of Letter Carriers union).[/li][/ul]
Other than that, go for it. 
My ex is a rural carrier, and everything Duck Duck says is basically right. However, be aware that it takes around 14 years to get to the top of the pay scale. After that, you can basically forget about ever getting a raise again. Every year the P.O. does a “mail count” where everyone counts how many letters you deliver, how long your route is, etc. and they have a very complicated formula for figuring out the “evaluation” of your route. Your pay is directly based on this evaluation. Then they start shuffling around the routes, taking pieces off one person’s route and adding it to another, adding part-time routes, etc. so that your route never gets big enough to actually give you a raise.
The best part of the job (according to him) is getting out of the office for half the day. So you do get some time to yourself, etc. And it is a “job for life” if that’s what you want. For someone with a not-too-stellar education and a lot of patience (with bureaucracy, etc.) I think it’s a very good path. You will NEVER be laid off, you will get good health insurance and vacation, etc.
Also, FYI the salary scale if the same all over the country. So depending on where you live, that could either give you a pretty good quality of life, or a medium but acceptable quality of life (if you live where the cost of living is high).
Say! You don’t mess around with guns do you?
This sounds just like the Australian Post Office. When I started there, one of the recruits asked, “what do you need to do to get fired?”
“Steal something or hit somebody.”
A few more things about rural vs. city:
[ul]
[li]Rural routes are always ‘all drive’ meaning you never have to get out and deliver the mail by hand. City routes can be all drive, both drive and walking (‘park & loop’), or all walking (which is a real drag in the pouring rain or two feet of snow).[/li]
[li]You’ve no doubt noticed that postal vehicles are right-hand drive. Although the Postal Service will officially deny this, if you use your own car for a rural route it means sitting on the passenger’s side and steering with your left hand and using your left foot for the gas & brake (and forget about trying to do it with a manual transmission).[/li]
[li]Rural post offices usually only have a couple of different routes (3 or 4) while city post offices routinely have 20 or 30 or more (meaning it takes a lot longer to learn all of them).[/li]
[li]In general, rural post offices are a much more friendly, casual, laid-back kind of work environment, whereas city post offices can be nothing but lying, back-stabbing politics.[/li][/ul]
A question for Duck Duck Goose
Are you a postman? It sounds like you have experiance with this. I live in Appleton Wisconsin and would hope to get a route somewere in a city of about 100k people. Is there a website with more info that you know of?
Thanks,
Ben
–Duck’s spouse did the P.O. interview.
Actually, with standardized salary it seems that a route in a low cost area would be ideal. In some areas of the country an annual $50,000 allows you to live very comfortably.
Now I have a question…how can the Post Office attract any decent workers around San Francisco?
renigademaster: Here’s how the P.O. job application process works (for city and rural carriers). First, the local post office posts a public notice (on a bulletin board in the lobby) that the test is going to be given on such-and-such a date. This test is given to cover the needs of a whole region (e.g. a county). Then you apply to take the test, then you take the test. I think that when you take the test, you specify the particular towns you are interested in working in. Then the tests get scored and everyone who took the test is put on a list, with the best scorers at the top of the list (military veterans get a few bonus points). They tell you your score and you will know where you are on the list.
When the P.O. actually needs to hire someone, they take people from the top of the list (assuming nobody in-house bids for the job). Sometimes they will call people to be substitute carriers. (You can take the substitute job and later big on a permanent job.) You have to take a drug test and a driving test at that point.
Re: preparing for the written test, there are test prep books out there that you should use to become familiar with the format of the test. The test is not difficult. You don’t have to memorize anything before the test.
If you don’t want to have to physically walk into all the post offices every week looking for the notice on the bulletin board, you should ask the postmaster when they think the next test will be given. Usually it’s once or twice a year, I think.
Good luck!
No, my hubby’s been carrying mail since 1983.
There’s good general info here.
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos141.htm
http://www.nalc.org/nalc/career/
Also some info here, but not much.
http://www.usps.com/employment/
Since you say you just got out of high school, what I’d do is go take the test where you’re living now–and then get on with your life. Go to college, whatever. Two years from now they may call you, or then again they may not, and you can’t spend the next couple of years sitting on the couch waiting for a callback from the USPS that may never come.
Even if you pick a city where you think you’d like to live, like Milwaukee, and go down there and take the test–even then, after you take the test, get on with your life, okay?
Besides, listen to this Old Lady when she tells you that people can change so utterly in only two years that by the time the Milwaukee Post Office calls you back, you may be doing something so totally different from what you’re doing now, that you’ll just roll your eyes and drop the letter in the circular file. “Geez, I forgot all about taking that Post Office test…”
Samclem:
FYI, didja know that jokes about guns are now officially so “un-funny” to the U.S. Postal Service that you can now get fired at the U.S. Postal Service just for saying, “I’m gonna go home and clean my guns…”? Fact–it happened to a carrier here in Decatur. He “had words” with a supervisor, left work muttering vague threats, got called in to the Front Office the next day, and they fired his butt out of there.
Which seemed counter-intuitive to me, ya know? He’s P.O.'ed at the P.O. so, what, you fire him? So now he’s really got a reason to go home and clean his guns.
But they didn’t ask me…