Friends and Enemies

I started another two weeks of work at the Post Office today. What do they call it when you do something over and over and over again, yet fail to learn anything by it? Oh yeah…STUPIDITY.

I do it for the children. Okay, I actually do it for the money and every morning when I wake, I question whether it is worth the effort. It boils down to the fact that when all is said and done, I will have about $500 in my pocket after a couple of weeks that I wouldn’t have had other wise. Yes, that kind of does make me a money whore and a cheap whore at that. Such is life in the fast lane.

I believe that in any situation there is something for me to learn that will ultimately be of a benefit. Sometimes the benefit is that I learn what it is that I don’t want to waste any more of my time on. I think in this particular case I am learning about people and just how I relate and interact with them. I know pretty much why the retired postal workers are there. It is something of a comfort fitting back in where you spent so much of your life. There are also people working there who are if not friends, then they are of the same mental makeup as you are. Old posties are easy, in more ways than one.

The people that I find interesting are the other ones that are working as counters. For the most part, they are pleasant, happy, relatively intelligent people. They are mostly looking for full time employment having become unemployed for a variety of reasons. They tell of all the job interviews that they have gone to and rarely do they find out why they didn’t make the cut. I would hire most of them without question. I suppose that it’s a good thing I don’t have a business or it would be staffed with a load of misfits and ne’er do wells.

I have been labouring under the assumption that there is work out there if you are only willing to look for it. Well, these people sure are looking for it, but it seems to be quite elusive. Maybe that is what I am learning from this experience. I would like to help them, and I do try, but since it has been 35 years since I applied for work, my skills are more than a little rusty. The only thing I can do is to be as positive as I can be, make the time counting as pleasant for them as possible and keep my eyes and ears open for any jobs that might be worth pursuing.

The best advice I can give them to find a job is that they should travel back in time to the mid to late 70’S and apply at the Post Office. I know they were hiring pretty much anyone that was upright and had a pulse. Mind you, if they could travel back in time there are far more lucrative ways to earn a buck than working at the Post Office. You could buy gold pretty cheap, get in on the ground floor at Apple and find those guys that invented Trivial Pursuit and invest a thousand bucks.

I hope that my new friends get jobs soon and that I don’t see them ever again. It is odd that the same can be said of my enemies.