My five days of work is done this week, my weekend begins on Sunday. Yesterday the man who will begin doing Saturdays for me rode along on the mail route.
It is interesting to see how a man looks at the route, compared to a woman. He sees the route, but not what his is going to be delivering.
He is a bus driver during the week, so he was concentrating on the route, thinking that knowing the route and learning to drive on the right is the hardest part of the job.
He failed to understand you don’t get to do the driving until you get all the mail sorted, and in order to sort quickly, you practice and practice and memorize and memorize.
He kept going back to his strengths… his knowing bus routes and driving a bus.
And I would focus on what he doesn’t know yet…sorting mail.
The sorting sets the tone, sets the pace and will slurp up many hours of daylight, if you don’t know where the letter in your hand goes, and you have three trays of mail, each holding 300 plus pieces.
Overlooking this part puzzled me, and I quickly learned that the only way he will learn is by doing, so I left him at the end of the day with a tub of catalogs, each needing to find their home in the 469 slots.
Nothing teaches like experience.
Nothing shows you how much you don’t know than by standing with one small catalog searching for its home, and watching the time slip away, while you hunt and hunt and hunt again, the name not meaning anything, the road seeming lost among the many small dirt roads, and you trying to remember which part of the route it was on, the beginning middle or end, and looking upon the pile yet to go…the 469 slots all seem alike, the names printed below unfamiliar, the five digit fire numbers mocking with a mysterious sequence, the roads failing to click in route formation, now you know what you don’t know!
The stance of ineptness is so clear it feels overwhelming. And the knowing that you have 469 houses waiting for their mail.
We are one of the small offices who get their mail that is mixed up and needs to be sorted, most mail comes to the carrier presorted to the route, and you just take it out and deliver.
In our office you can only deliver what you know. Isn’t that a great metaphor for life that we have to be willing to not know until we know, and that we can’t give out what we don’t know?
It takes a certain person to be able to do this job, and we don’t know until they are placed in the postal pressure cooker.
