Postal. A word capable of meaning either "of or relating to the post office" or "to lose control or go crazy, especially in a violent way (source)." In this guide, we'll be talking (mostly) about the former. Welcome to the wonderful and not-actually-violent-all-that-often world of dealing with other people's mail.

 

"I'll deliver that dental appointment reminder postcard on time, by golly, or die trying." (Source)

In its earliest incarnations, the post office was sort of like a guild of brazen adventurers, courageous men and women willing to brave the world's harshest brigands, geography, and weather in order to deliver everything from love poems to military orders without ever knowing what was inside the envelope. Today, traveling postal workers just drive around in little cars listening to sweet jams. And what if things ever did get too hairy for them to make a delivery? No worries. People can always just email it anyway.

Still, despite what's been an obvious historical decline in rugged gallantry, postal workers aren't doing too poorly for themselves (especially considering the fundamental lack of education and training necessary to do the job). The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has determined that the median pay of a postal service worker is $25.53 an hour, or about $53,100 a year (source). Not too bad for spending afternoons rollin' in your 5.0 with the window down so your hair can blow, now is it?

 

You call it "junk mail," they call it "basically our last source of reliable revenue." (Source)

Speaking of definitions and "historical decline," the U.S. Post Office has basically owned that term for what may soon be a decade. The post office has lost between 2.8 and 15.8 billion dollars every year since 2007 (source). Yeah, just you try and not feel at least a little bit guilty next time you fire up Gmail. Pair what appears to be a declining number of open positions with an above-average "I-didn't-go-to-college" wage, and you've got a recipe for what may soon become a surprisingly competitive field.

So what exactly are all of these postal people doing each day? Well, for the most part it's broken down into three primary areas of work. First, you have the carriers: the people you see go-kart up to your door everyday to drop off all that junk mail you were waiting on. 

Then you have the clerks: the men and women who people love glaring at when the line at the post office is too long. And finally, there are the sorters: the people who perform the heroic job of actually reading the chicken-scratch address you've scrawled onto that envelope in order to choose which bag it belongs in.

No matter which path you choose (or which path chooses you, our young mail-handling Padawan), you're pretty much looking at the same thing: an incredibly typical day job. You're going to have a short, on-the-job training session when you're hired, be paid by the hour, and go home whenever your shift ends. There's one key difference, but you're not going to like it. You also have to work on Saturdays. See? We knew you wouldn't like that part.

The position of postal worker will never go down in history as the most strenuous job you ever had—unless a monotonous daily grind is the sort of thing that gets to you (see: alternate definition of "postal" above)—but it might go down as one of your favorites. Just so long as you can survive the slow, predictable decline into the murky sea of financial unpredictability, that is.

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