Long Day

A thirteen-hour work day is too damned much.

Following the MLK holiday, went to work Tuesday morning to find not only multiple tubs of magazines, catalogs and other flats (not unexpected), but also multiple 2-foot trays of letter-sized mail.

Since the Postal Service introduced DPS (Delivery Point Sequencing) some years ago, where most of the letter mail is now sorted by machine, only about a foot of letter mail (unmachinable for one reason or another) needs to be sorted by each carrier in the morning before taking mail out to the street for delivery.

So, besides having the (expected) larger-than-usual volume of machine-sorted mail, we also had all these trays of letters to be hand-sorted and routed for delivery, in volume I hadn't seen since before automation really got going. Which meant the time spent in the office before going to street delivery was hours longer than usual.

So I'm much later getting out to the street, and with the heavy volume, the street delivery time also keeps stretching out longer and longer. The 8-hour point, 3:00, arrives and I've only done about half the route's deliveries. I call in for assistance, only to be told none's available.

I keep going. Lunch is (finally) at 5:00, then I start deliveries on the final group of streets, usually a little less than two hours work.

At 6:30, I've still got two streets left. The sun's down, my headlights are lit, and the cabin and cargo-section lights are on so I can see the trays of mail. I head for the next-to-last street, Julie, and I see...

...another mail truck!, just turning onto Julie itself. The station managed to send some assistance after all! Yay! I've been working twelve hours at this point, and I am so glad to see some help arrive. Quickly, I pull up behind the other truck where it's stopped on Julie.

And the other truck...

makes a quick U-turn...

and drives...

the fuck...

away.

There's only one suitable thing to say in that situation:

"VORGA! I kill you filthy, Vorga!"