Post-USPS Retirement Life: One Year Later

 Well, that went by quick.  Today is the one year anniversary of my retirement from the U.S. Postal Service. For 34 years and 8 months, I delivered mail in Pacific Grove, California.  A great city to work in. If only I could say the same for the job.  To be fair, there were good Postal years and bad Postal years.  Ok, more bad than good. 

 

 To recap, I started my Postal odyssey on September 3, 1985.  I was the youngest employee in the office.  And for a small/medium sized office, we had a good amount of employees.  Automation was about a decade away, so we had many clerks and even more carriers than we needed.  But once automation kicked in, the downward spiral of the USPS began.  Slowly, year by year, offices were being adjusted to accommodate the new era of postal automation.  Clerks who sorted mail weren't needed as much.  And carrier routes were being added on to because we weren't spending as much time in the office.  So, the routes got longer.  The geniuses in postal management didn't think this through very well.  The more you add on to our street deliveries the longer the routes became.  It didn't matter if we were handling less in the office or not.  So, tensions among supervisors and carriers began to increase.  I was lucky to have good supervisors throughout my postal years.  And working in a relatively small office meant any tensions didn't get too far out of hand.

  There were two milestones I needed to retire.  Reach age 56 and have 30 years in.  The 30 years I hit in 2015.  But I was only 51 then.  Which meant trying to hang on for another five years.  As I said before, if the situation was better, staying until I was 60 might have been a possibility.  But nothing improved.  My route got longer.  The package business took off, making a large route even larger, and even worse, our office was short-staffed.  I never worked so hard in my postal life.  This was not how I thought it would be.  Seniority used to mean something in the postal service.  When I started, carriers who had been there 20-30 years basically did their routes and went home.  Maybe they worked some overtime on their own routes, but that was it.  This all changed as the 2000's went on.  Seeing that nothing was going to improve, and possibly get worse, I retired the minute I was eligible. 

  But what a time to retire! Right in the middle of the biggest global pandemic in 100 years. Any travel plans I had were nixed. Basically, I've stuck around the Monterey Peninsula since last May, and tried not to get COVID.  But hope is out there.  I've been fully vaccinated, and the world is slowly starting to open up.  Oh, and even more importantly, I have absolutely no regrets about retiring.  Today, there are only vague remnants of my former life.  My body clock is still on postal time though, so I remain a morning person.  The first months of retirement I still had postal nightmares about the job, just like I did when I was working. Those are now gone.  I left behind some wonderful customers, and many co-workers, who I don't see enough.  The USPS will always be a part of my history. It continues to play a big part in American life.  I'm proud of the work I did there.  But my life is so much more fulfilling now.  So, I think of this one year anniversary as Retirement 2.0, or a reboot, if you will.  And still waiting to see what post-USPS life will bring. 

Here's my first retirement piece I wrote last year: My 34 Years, 8 Months with the USPS