My Worst Job

Essay by badballCollege, UndergraduateA+, August 2005

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I have worked in several unfulfilling jobs in the years since I graduated from high school. A six month stint on the eleven to seven shift at the local Seven-Eleven was an exercise in receiving abusive, demeaning comments from drunken patrons, and working as a roofer was physically uncomfortable. Sometimes I still seem to feel my skin burning from the boiling pitch we used. Yet, these were but minor annoyances compared to the only job whose memories still bring teeth-clenching waves of mental nausea, that of a letter carrier in Philadelphia's Logan neighborhood.

On my first day assigned to the Logan Post Office, I quickly concluded that my immediate supervisors were a collection of would be thugs and drunken incompetents. The first supervisor I met was Tim. Tim was about five foot, three inches tall, and used his authority to try and compensate for his lack of stature. Tim loved to stand behind you as you sorted countless letters into the shelves of your lettercase, eyes boring holes in the back of your head, muttering endearments like, "You're the reason the Post Office is losing money!" and other, less printable epithets.

Lilly, our station manager, was a bright, witty woman, whose presence in the Postal Service was a mystery to me, as she seemed too intelligent to be working there. The reason she belonged at Logan station was made abundantly clear one day when Lilly began to read a "safety talk" about wet weather driving. The whispers began immediately: "The office door is closed, this ought to be good!" What began as instruction on safe following distances began slowly to veer from the subject at hand. First, she stopped in the middle of the talk to berate some of the carriers who were apparently not paying attention to her, then...