Pitching parcels for the holidays

I considered several jobs for winter 2017. I needed a job that was flexible, paid well, and located in Austin, Texas where we'd be for November and December. Working for Amazon. Waiting tables. Using my van to be a courier. Pitching parcels for the holidays as a seasonal United States Postal Service worker fit the bill.

I was assigned to the Bluebonnet Station, the very same post office that used to delivery mail to our old house on Dorset Drive. After a couple of weeks on the job, I found the sorting station the postal carrier used to put our mail in the right sequence for easy delivery. I stared for a while recalling some of the memorable letters, post cards, and publications we received for the 7 years we owned our house. It's odd how a slot in a metal cabinet I'd never seen before could bring back so many good memories of the life we had when we lived in a sticks and bricks house.

This mail van always caught my eye. It'd make a nice camper!

During orientation I learned the work would be physically demanding, but I had no idea how grueling it would be. The work schedule was my first problem. Some days,  I'd come in at noon. Other days, I was needed at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. I'd work 10 or 12-hours with a 30-minute lunch. When a day shift butted up against a night shift, it wrecked me. I also only got one day off per week. There were times I'd wake up unexpectedly and not know if it was morning or night. It was like being in a perpetual state of jet lag.

The hardest thing to get used to was the strength and energy it took to do the job. As a Holiday Clerk Assistant (HCA), my job was to help sort the huge increase in parcels that flood the post office during the holidays. A parcel is anything that isn't a letter or a magazine and can range in size from an envelope smaller than a sandwich bag to a box big enough for a person to stand in. Boxes could weigh as much as 70 pounds.

You've heard of tennis elbow. I developed parcel pitching elbow.

Parcels come all mixed together from several different sources. FedEx, UPS, and DAHL all use the USPS to some degree or another to sort or deliver many of their customer's packages. Each brought what seemed like endless numbers of parcels to the dock multiple times each day. A USPS semi truck would also bring a full trailer load of letters, magazines, and parcels several times each day.

Everything that comes through the mail is loaded on on of four kinds of containers, an OTR, a PostCon, a Gaylor, or a wrapped pallet. OTRs, the largest container, are 500-pound aluminum rolling carts that measure roughly 3x5x5 feet. PostCons are metal rolling carts about half the size of an OTR that have a netting made of seat belt fabric. Gaylors are enormous heavy duty card board boxes about 4x4x4 feet set on a plastic pallet. Wrapped pallets came directly from Amazon and were usually stacked about 6 feet tall.

Every parcel must be scanned and placed in one of about 100 large rolling hampers, each of which correspond to a postal route. Postal carriers then load the parcels up, along with regular mail, and deliver them. Sounds simple, but when you're dealing with thousands of parcels daily, it gets hectic beyond description. There are so may parcels, there literally isn't enough time for you to walk the parcel to the right hamper -- you must pitch the parcel.

Clerks either use a large overhead scanner or a ring scanner strapped to index and middle fingers to scan the bar code on each parcel. This logs the package into the system so people who track their packages can find out their item's location. Scanning also tells the clerk which postal route the parcel belongs to.

Scan pitch. Scan pitch. Scan pitch.

Some parcels must be pitched into a 3-by-4-foot hamper more 20 feet away. There is every shape, size, and weight or parcel you can imagine. When they're all jumbled together, you can't always tell which one is heavy and which one is loosely packed. Heavy parcels fly predictably, if you can manage enough strength to heave it. The loosely packed ones wobble, often making you lose your mark. I learned to fling odd-shaped parcels underhand to make wobbly ones spin vertically. That really increased accuracy.

Scan pitch. Scan pitch.

We'd get so many OTRs, pallets, and Gaylors, there often wasn't enough room to get around. You'd have to move several containers over a few inches each, just to make way to get the one you needed.

Scan pitch. Scan pitch. Scan pitch.

Hampers would quickly fill up, so you'd often have to rearrange the parcels or replace it with an empty hamper. We always ran out of hampers. It was usually a mad dash to beat the postal carriers. After their morning meeting with the floor supervisor, carriers would sort their load of letters. Then a mad dash of chaos followed as carriers rolled their overflowing hampers to their work area to put parcels in order and load them into delivery vehicles. The scene was often overwhelming, a mix of laughter, curses, and last-minute mail.

One by one, clerks would peel off to take a break or eat. Soon, we'd start stuffing mail into post office boxes.

Right as most carriers were getting close to being done loading vehicles, Priority Express parcels would arrive. Another mad dash! Those parcels needed to be scanned, sorted by postal route, the tracking number hand written on a log, then taken to the right postal carriers, who were all itching to leave to get deliveries started. No one wanted a Priority Express parcel because they have to be delivered by a certain time.

It was amazing to me to see a part of the inner workings of a federal system that serves us all. I had no idea what it took to get a package delivered. Most of us simply order something we want online then it arrives at our doorstep. The whole system in between is fascinating and provides good paying jobs for a lot of people.

My constantly body ached and my mind sometimes reeled at the mountain of parcels, but good coworkers helped. Sharing the load, solving problems on the fly, joking, and getting to know each other really made the work a tiny bit easier. I got stronger and my aim dramatically improved.

This is not a workamping job. We were lucky enough to have a friend in Austin who let us boondock in her driveway. The job runs from late November through the first week of January and the pay's not bad -- $17 per hour, plus differential pay for working nights and the occasional overtime pay means this is a winter job I'm likely to work every holiday. That is, if my body can recover!