When I graduated from college, I was sure that the world would beat a path to my door. Who wouldn’t want to hire me for a cushy job in public relations or marketing.
I guess they were using a different path back then because I didn’t even get my foot in the door. I was fresh out of college, married, a kid on the way, so I was quickly running out of options.
I had a folder an inch thick of rejections. And then out of the blue, I got a job, a real job.
I guess your first real job is always great, mostly because you don’t know any better. There’s nothing before it to compare it to. Sure, I had my work-study jobs in college, but they weren’t real jobs. Pulling in $275 a month isn’t exactly going to put you on Park Place or Boardwalk.
Not that I was pulling in a lot more at my new job. I was a Mail Clerk/Driver 1 at Associated Grocers. My job was to drive the mail car around four times a day on a set route. When I wasn’t doing that, I would process mail, stuff product order books into the slots for each store and make copies.
For this highly skilled work I got paid $5/hour. Factoring in inflation, that would be about $11.80 today. Not bad for driving around a mail car.
Initially, the route took me some time to do, not because I was screwing around, but because I hadn’t gotten into the rhythm of the roll. My stops were pretty simple. In the morning, I headed out of the yard, stopped at the credit union, the post office and the bakery, then back to the yard with stops at meat/produce and general merchandise. In the evenings, there was one last run to the post office with all the processed mail of the day.
I know. Not exactly hard to do. I think that’s why I liked the job so much. As I got faster on my route, I continued to come back later and later. Wait a minute, you say? This doesn’t make any sense?
Well, it does if you’re out shopping at thrift stores, grabbing a bite to eat, moving your possessions from one place to another, picking up new furniture for your new digs and on several occasions, getting laid while “en route.”
Looking back, I’m really glad I never had a problem with the car starting during one of my many unauthorized stops. Or that they had GPS back then so they could track me as they do now.
Eventually, the mail car didn’t serve our needs. Its death knell was that big chunk of sidewalk I hit on my route one day. It fell off a truck I was following on Airport Way and it punched a hole right through the bottom of the car as I four-byed my way over it.
In its place they gave me a shiny new van. Now we’re talking. I could move a lot more stuff with the van than I ever could with the Fairmont wagon.
Eventually, the nice summers and decent falls gave way to icy and snowy winters. The van was great in the snow, though the route really did take me a while to do. I even ended up taking the van home with me. No, I didn’t just take it. My boss, Connie Hines, lived in West Seattle, as did I. She had me take the van home so I could pick her up drive her into work in the morning.
She had an odd sense of job duties back then. Another of my job duties was to warm up her car, scrape the ice off and occasionally take it to get serviced. I didn’t mind. I was getting paid either way.
On Fridays, I had to do one extra task on my go to the post office route. I had to make the bank deposit. I still remember these deposits. Something in the neighborhood of $12 million entrusted to me each Friday. Yes, I can be trusted with stuff like this. Though I do profess to being terribly afraid of being robbed, to the point that I almost handed a guy the deposit bag and the car keys when he came out of the darkness of the bank parking lot on time. He only wanted directions. I’m sure he would have been quite shocked to be handed millions of dollars.
Eventually, I got promoted. I’m not sure how that happened. If I recall, the two people above me left, so they moved me off the route and into the mailroom. I wasn’t in charge of it. No. Rather, I was the only one who knew all the machinations of slotting the order books and packaging up all the mail so that it got from point A to point B every night.
I didn’t really like my “promotion” that much. By now I was pulling in a cool $6 per hour, having picked up along the way one raise that amounted to 5ยข an hour. I actually asked if they just wanted to keep it.
No matter. By now, four years had passed in my mailroom career. Why did I stay so long? Well, I really wanted to work in Associated Grocers’ ad agency. I applied constantly for a position there – anything, just to get that proverbial foot in the door. Finally, I got that break. I was hired to be the company’s Public Relations Director.
Imagine for a moment. On Friday, you’re making the last run to the post office. Then, the following Monday, you’re in a suit and checking into your new office. Everyone knows you were in the mailroom last week. All that’s changed is the color of your shirt, going from blue to white over the weekend.
Sometimes I still miss the mailroom. It was one of the few times I’ve had a job that at 5 p.m., I didn’t have to think about until 8:30 the next morning. Ah, those were the good old days.
In the Emerald City, wondering where the mailroom is at my new digs,
– Robb