AND… this morning I got up at four in the fucking morning, because Mondays are absolutely brutal and the supervisor asked us if we could come in an hour early. What I said was, “Okay,” but what I thought was, There’s earlier than this?

Seriously, at that hour of the morning the only other people on the road are the police, the drunks, and the big rigs. And I passed some of each on my way to work.

Mondays are rough because, although the post office is closed on Sundays, the mail keeps coming anyway. So Monday morning there’s almost twice as much mail as usual. One of the carriers speculated on what this would look like if the post office closes on Saturdays as well, which is once more being considered.

It’s a more tiring job than you’d think. We don’t sit in a quiet office counting; we stand at makeshift stations around the sorting room, dragging over bins loaded with magazines and flyers and catalogs. We have to get there before the carriers do, because the carriers can’t start sorting the mail until we’ve counted it. After the first couple of days I had learned which of my carriers has the most mail on her route—and she arrives an hour before anyone else to start sorting it—and I make sure to get the bulk of hers done by seven so she’ll have something to work on.

There are big machines sorting mail on one side of the room (it’s more like a big open hangar than a room), and it provides a noisy backdrop for most of the morning: the roaring of the engines, the clatter of the trays, the strident beeping when one gets jammed up and wants attention. There are regular crashes and thuds as heavy bins full of paper get dropped on the floor. There’s the clang and rattle of the metal carts on concrete. There’s the radio in back playing the local pop station.

Around 10:30 or so (later on Mondays, when there’s more mail), the machines go quiet. After that the counting is pretty much over; we gather up a few stragglers that got kicked out of the machine sort, or were thrown to the wrong route (that’s the term they use, “Who threw this?” as in, “Who put this piece of mail in my box?”). We count up the parcels, which is another kind of exercise because they get counted differently if they have special treatment like delivery confirmation, insurance, and whatnot.

Finally the carriers report the mail they had to “mark up,” for whatever reason (no such address, no mailbox, whatever). Often the supervisor sends me home before all my carriers have done so, because after the bulk of the carriers have left the supervisors can easily handle the remainder.

In the afternoons, one of us will remain to count the mail the carriers picked up while they were out. We take turns with that one. It’s considerably easier, as the carriers tend to come back one or two at a time, and there’s not nearly as much coming back as there was going out.

So that’s what it’s like to count mail for the post office. It’s not that hard, and the carriers can usually answer any questions about what category something should be counted as. This is one of those jobs that’s tailor-made for a temp—it’s great to do for the short term, but I wouldn’t want to make a career of it.

The spouse and one of the kids have been sick, but I don’t think I got it from them—they were pretty well on the mend by the time I caught it. I suspect I picked it up from a co-worker; half the people around me seem to be sniffling, coughing, and/or sneezing.

So I have to drag my sick, pitiful ass out of bed at five in the fucking morning. Because if I don’t show up for work it would be really hard on everyone else who has to pick up the slack in my absence.

Thank $DEITY for Dayquil.

For the record: counting mail is boring. It’s one of those jobs that is monotonous and mind-numbingly dull, yet requires your full attention. The count must be accurate because it affects the carriers’ salaries. You also have to categorize things correctly, because some are worth more (pay-wise).

Most days we get all the mail counted and leave before noon. They do need one person to stay until the carriers return from their routes, and count the mail they picked up. We’re rotating days so we all get a couple each week; I drew Saturday and Tuesday for my long days. Saturday was an eleven-hour shift. I haven’t been on my feet that long since my waitressing days.

It’s not a job I’d want to do all the time, but as a temporary thing it’s tolerable. At least I get to work in the back and don’t have to deal with customers. Locker room gossip informs me they’ve recently reduced the number of clerks out front, and the ones remaining are swamped.

Behold, my very first bento lunch.

I was suspicious (hardly any reputable companies use throwaway Hotmail addresses these days, it just doesn’t look professional), but I responded anyway.

Their reply:

Thank you for your interest in the position we have listed on Craigslist – Accounting Asst. Please go to

http://career-network-rockymount.com/ and you can complete the application process. You can do it! Sincerely Gail P pls note – I have 2 other positions open, billing associate and Administrative Accounting Aide. If you are interested pls send me a separate email for each with job title in the subject line thanks, this facilitates a faster reply GailP good luck. Also consider looking into some additional training/education as there are funds available.

Yeah. One of the first things you learn is that if they send you to another web site to “complete the application process,” there is no job. They’re just harvesting your data, or trying to generate clickthroughs, or both.

I did a search on the domain name, and discovered it’s one of literally thousands being used by one guy for these fake job ads—what he’s really pitching is continuing education. (Check out the list at the bottom, of only some of the domains he’s used.)

Job scammers like this will be going to that very special level of hell reserved for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

As a result, we’ve got a lot of potholes in the roads. Some of them are real axle-busters—one just up the road from us had cones and warning lights around it until the city could get it filled in.

Monday night, driving The Artist home from his evening class, I encountered one of these vicious road hazards. It was dark, it was raining, and I didn’t see the hole in time to avoid it. My little Nanovan banged through it, and immediately my tire pressure warning light came on.

“Uh oh,” I remarked, and babied her into the nearest parking lot. I sought out a streetlight with plenty of open parking spaces around it, and we got out to inspect the damage.

“Yep, definitely flat,” observed The Artist.

I was reflecting on an interesting fact: although I’ve had two or three flat tires before this, I’ve never actually changed one myself. A helpful male always swoops in and takes care of it for me. This works out well for everyone, because he gets to feel good about himself for helping, and I don’t have to change the tire.

In this case, though, the helpful male available had never changed a tire, either. But I can read a manual with the best of them, so I got out the trusty owner’s manual (mainly I wanted to make sure I was bracing the jack in the right place) and together we got the spare on.

So yesterday instead of helping out at the homeless shelter, I was sitting in the lounge of NTB waiting for them to put a new tire on. I called the shelter to let them know I wasn’t coming in, feeling like a total slacker because I won’t be coming in for the next couple of weeks either (starting a temp job next week).

I figure that temp job should just about cover the cost of the tire. I feel like a financial Sisyphus.

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Hat tip to Brokey McPoverty for this helpful diagram.

She’s been working on the issue since then. It’s a bit difficult as the perpetrators live in another county, but she’s irate and she’s determined. She called last week to let me know how things are progressing, and see if I want to get in on the court action with her.

Someone has committed fraud in my name. You bet your ass I want in on the court action.

We’re going to meet next week to exchange information and sketch out our game plan. She’s got the information about the couple who sold her the van: name, address, etc. I’ve got a copy of the estimate I got from the repair shop, detailing the problem with the van and how much it would cost to get it fixed (seems that one particular paper mysteriously disappeared from the folder of papers I turned over with the van).

She’s also been talking to the sheriff’s office in the other county; apparently these people have pulled this particular trick a number of times, and the sheriff’s department was very helpful and forthcoming with all the information she could need to press charges. Sounds like they’d like to do something about these folks, too.

Should be an interesting experience. You know, as in the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

Our little group learned how to distinguish between letter, flat, and parcel (each group gets counted separately). There’s a nifty little gauge for measuring anything that’s so close to the size boundary that we can’t just eyeball it. There’s a particular form to fill out with our totals (of course there is, this is the government), and we have to fill it out in just a certain way (natch). It’s important that we count accurately, because the letter carriers’ salaries are determined in part by this data.

It took an hour, but we’ll get paid for four because that’s the temp agency’s minimum. Woot!

So I’ve got work for a couple of weeks. Paycheck = good. Even better, I’m hoping after I’m done my manager from this job will allow me to use him/her as a reference for future work. I strongly suspect that a major stumbling block in finding a job is the fact that I’ve been out of the work force for so long; I’m hoping a current reference on my résumé will help to remedy that.