Twoism

I miss the peace of fishing like when I was a boy.

- Marko Ramius, The Hunt for Red October

Captain Ramius was an old submarine commander who had spent too many years at sea waging a pointless and inglorious pseudo war to maintain the balance of power. This has next to nothing in common with what I'm about to say. I miss the peace of delivery on a Saturday morning. It's now eight months since the Delivery Methods Revision and this week marks five years since I started the job.

And The Money Kept Rolling In (And Out)

PART TWO OF A SERIES.

Corporate (red)washing, jonathan mcintosh, 2007

Some have never had it so good. You might be mistaken for thinking there was an economic crash not four years ago and that we are living in a recession, but that's because you aren't the 1%. As we saw abroad and now domestically, a leaderless movement has now come to prominence. If successful in nothing else, Occupy has brought home the message of wealth inequality through the 'We are the 99%' slogan. The extreme inversion of the scales in the economic clout of the top 1% versus the remaining 99% betrays an uncomfortable truth about our egalitarian and meritocratic societies - that we are actually living in plutocracies. The egalitarian and meritocratic principles of western society are what comprise The American Dream, and yet like a dream we think we're awake. Eisenhower may have warned us about relations between the state and private contractors during the heights of the New Deal society, but Franklin D Roosevelt spoke in 1938 of a more elementary danger that "among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing". If some members of society have greater private power than others then it logically follows that others have less power. This is the very basic fact that underpins the subversion of liberal democracy.

Just the Two of Us

Crushed By The Wheels of Industry (Music Video), Heaven 17, 1982

Last December I hardly wrote anything because the crushing Christmas post meant that I was going to bed early to get up for work early to work till late. It's October and that's already the state of affairs. Only resourceful use of scheduled posts has kept me from being completely silent this month. How is it that one of the better months of the year is resulting in massive overtime payouts, uncompleted walks and undelivered packets? It's not Christmas, it's not snowing... it's "modernisation"!

Walk Out To Winter

Ecosse C285, Dave Hamster, 2009

See Christmas? Christmas is a bastard.
-Still Game, Cold Turkey (2005 Christmas Special)

It goes without saying that Christmas is an exceptional time of year at Royal Mail. It's fittingly the antipode of summer. Whereas the sunny season is so light that overtime claims are banned, December is a cash bonanza for those willing to take on as much work as possible - morning prep, doing parts of other walks, IVO, RLB, driving lorries, working your day off. If you need the money, so be it. I'm not interested in working myself to death so I only opt in for the early starts, mainly to deal with gone-aways and do the detective work required of the mal-addressed items that people continue to post every year.

Waking Up And Getting Up Has Never Been Easy

Postmen in the Snow, Rupert Brun, 2010

Throughout this productive year I've maintained the post-a-week pace of writing by planning out the following month in advance. Usually there's around ten drafts in varying levels of completion If I'm struggling to bring a scheduled draft up to standard I'll postpone it a month and bring forward a more complete one. December was to be no different, only accommodating a two week gap between the first week and the Christmas week for obvious employment reasons. Unfortunately I fell ill in the first week which scratched the first post and the past two weeks has seen the Royal Mail network buckling under the strain of the seasonal post and periodic blizzards. I've been waking up early, on the streets till late and going to bed early - rinse and repeat. As such, I've neither had the time nor energy to write.

Lineman for the County

Endorsing the Returns, Prij, 20/03/10

This week marks my third year working for Royal Mail and, coincidentally, another operational change has taken place. Even in this short time there have been noticeable changes, all of which are driven by the mantra 'mail-volumes-are-down-and-people-are-emailing-and-texting'. Roy Mayall has tackled these claims several times, so I needn't repeat his rebuttals.

When I started, weekday working hours were 0800 to 1300 with deliveries starting at 0930. In October 2007, despite union resistance, this shifted an hour back. The next initiative was 'summer lapsing' in June 2008. This involves dividing a duty amongst surrounding walks during the easy summer period. With the exception of Christmas, 'summer lapsing' now occurs Monday to Thursday using the 'starburst' delivery method. That knocked me off the walk I was on at the time (Hallmark Fount) exactly a year after starting. I didn't appreciate that present.

The Bitterest Pill

Royal Mail Success - This Letter Reached the Right Person, Neil Boyd, 2009

I've been working at Royal Mail for nearly three years now, but I've never really written about the job. I could swear like a sailor about management and the way RM is being intentionally driven into the ground, but I really like the job and wouldn't want to risk it over a bunch of rants - hard to believe this is from the man who wrote this at school and deliberately got suspended twice.

Actually, when I say I like the job what I mean is my walk, and the reason I'm writing this is because I've been moved off that delivery after 21 months and today was my last day on it. If I sound bitter it's not only because of my reputed early finishes (during the summer! Was I the only one who had a lull during the summer?), but because I had actually got to know a lot of people in the area. I greet the same faces each morning, residents say hi to me in the streets, one lady gives me an apple and a mars bar every Saturday, I see Mrs ABC nearly everyday for her sign-for packets, and so on. In fact, so long was I on that walk that I became less focused on finishing as early as possible and began to chat with Granny Smith.