So I just got home from my last shift as a postbezorger (literally a post deliverer) at PostNL. Although I wanted to finish my contract there, I still feel quite sad about it. I wanted to look back on my time, what I enjoyed, what I learnt, what I hated.
My first day, I was running late. It was March, I was in the middle of a move across the city, I’m always rushing things and I never think of my capacity or my energy when I plan new things. I stopped off at my old place on the way in, I left my bike keys behind in the old apartment, it was a mess. I arrived 10 minutes late and it was really no big deal, as I was greeted by Jasmijn (alias) who would be training me for the next week. She gave me my jacket, a vest to carry the mail on my chest, we attached the famous PostNL bike bags to my bike, we loaded the mail between our bags, and we cycled off to do her run.
Despite the unfamiliar feeling of my bike being so heavy, the job proved quite simple. You take out three pre-sorted bundles from the big orange bags of mail: one from K (klein/small, or usual letters), G (groot/big, usually magazines) and one from BP (Jasmijn told me she didn’t know why it was called this, but it was for small packages). You check quickly that they line up, and then you walk the street in the order that the mail tells you to. When you’re done, you head back to your bike, get the next mail, and do it again.
At first the job certainly required some concentration, to make sure I checked for all of the mail and that I went the right direction, but it wasn’t long before the four hours that I would deliver the mail in would become a sort of podcast filled trance, where I didn’t really have to think about much. I would come home happy, and I would wake up in the morning happy to start again. But also, I often worried.
I especially worried about time. Despite being calculated as 3 hour routes, it would routinely take me over 4 hours to complete the route for the day. This was an issue, as simultaneously I was in the last semester of my bachelor’s degree, taking me last courses and writing a 9,000 word thesis to complete it all. I am not a night owl, and this became even more evident for me as work that I designated to the evenings and nights would go undone, crammed into Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays, my free days. I would come home happy, sure, but so tired. Sometimes I would take my laptop with me, and go straight to the library afterwards.
This came to a head on one specific day. It was in the head of the thesis writing process, I was working on my draft and feeling horridly behind. So, this Tuesday, I headed to my main university building to work on my thesis and attend a meeting before my shift. I kept pushing my shift later and later into the day (one of the kindnesses about working somewhere where nobody is really supervising you), the weather was lovely, I had no worries about completing it. I headed to work at around 15, expecting that I would complete my shift and head back to the university to work a little more before going home. Well, around two hours into my shift, the largest rain and thunderstorm that I had ever seen whilst working opened above me. I was not prepared, in my heavy cotton trousers. I tried to continue, but I’ve always been afraid of thunderstorms and I certainly do not like to be in them. Soaked to the bone in only 15 minutes, I cycle back to the depot with the rest of the mail and I sit in the little lock-up container and I call the PostNL helpline. It’s after 17, and the usual call staff have gone home, but the after-hours staff told me to come back tomorrow, in the morning, and finish the route. What? I thought, but they won’t get their mail in time! But I was too relieved to not have to go back out there to really care. Plus, I had more time to work on my thesis, right?
I think it’s unsurprising that I really didn’t get much done. The rain had subsided within an hour of me being at the uni, I just went home. It was clear that it was becoming much too much for me. I dropped 3 hours from my contracted hours and started to take Saturdays off too, which was a delight.
The entire job was put on its head when, at the beginning of June, the day after I (somehow successfully) handed in my thesis, we moved to a new, bigger depot on the outside of the dorp where I deliver. The move came with new routes to learn and, in a turn that was very joyous to me, big gigantic electronic bakfiets which could fit all of the mail in, and could go so fast. It was an injection of fun and life into the job for me. The new routes took some getting used to, it took me once again 6 hours to complete 3 hour shifts. But I got the hang of it, and I was really enjoying delivering the mail again.
When I told people I was a postbezorger, they would often say something like, “it must be terrible when it rains!” Sure, it wasn’t super fun when it rained. But as the summer dawned, it became clear that the heat was much more of a problem for me. I never drink a lot of water and I’m not proud of that, but I never really realised how dangerous it was until I realised I could hardly cycle home after a shift because of the heat. I would come home, too nauseous to drink or climb the stairs but needing to drink to solve the problem, with a pounding headache and a big sensitivity to light. I really couldn’t let that happen again.
I have never really been social with my coworkers. A little bit more in the old depot, sure, where I would bump into Jasmijn and other people more frequently. But in the new depot, we would see each other a lot less (as we no longer needed to go back and forth to get more mail), and I never really spoke to anyone. Plus, my lacking Dutch proficiency doesn’t really help me with getting over the anxiety of approaching new people. But on my last day, after I arrived back at the depot to drop off the e-bike, I saw someone I recognised sat at the table where we mark wrongly sorted mail to be resorted. We had spoken before too, and we was one of the other coworkers who I knew was not a native Dutch speaker. We hadn’t spoken often, but we did sometimes exchange pleasantries in Dutch when we saw each other, as practice. And so, after some anxious deliberation, I approached him and I told him that today was my last day, maybe forever but probably just for a while, because I need to figure out my new schedule in my master’s programme first. He told me “I don’t have anything for you, but I will have to buy a flower and look at it every day because I can’t see you!” We both smiled, it was a nice thing to say. We spoke about anthropology a little, about his daughter who studies computing in the UK, about what working for PostNL was like. He headed for his shift and we said, “until next time!”
It was been nice to work for PostNL, people smile at you more in the street when you’re dressed in orange, or you have big bike bags in tow. As I cycled, I was always aware of how much someone can tell about my day with these bike bags, a constant advertisement for my job. As a philatelist, it was always great to see stamps from far and wide, to deliver postcards and birthday cards and official mail from other countries. I have an affinity for working in public, as part of a community and a system like this. Smiling and waving at people, ringing their doorbells and giving them their mail in their hands (which is something I was not meant to do…). Even if I don’t go back to delivering the mail, to being a postbezorger, I know that working alongside others in a public or community way is all I want to do. In a museum, in a university, in a school, or even in the streets, and even maybe as a postbezorger.