the end of the road

i drove my last bus for this company on may 1st. i found the irony inherent in this by the fact that it was may day and the worker's day in socialist lore. bus drivers of the world unite and undo your seatbelts. it was a long time in coming and i had simply worn down over the time that i was driving and calling in seven days a week. i mean, there has to be a job in the world where you don't have to speak to your management every day of the week. i had to loosen the seatbelt and climb out of the seat after the year was over. i began it telling myself last june that i would drive for a year and then add all of the miles that i had driven up into the great logbook and determine whether it was worth the time and the saddle sores. and my ass was sore... i drove a little over 54 thousand miles in a year (coast to coast about 10 times...) for an average of 4900 miles per month. there were days that i drove as few as the mileage from the garage to the terminal and back (2 miles) or as much as 547 miles in a day. and that only counted the mileage paid and not the 2 miles back and forth from the terminal and garage. all in all, enough mileage to make me too familiar with the contours of a bus seat.
now i am beginning the second part of reinventing myself through my work. it has been a long time dream for me to work for the usps. i could see myself wearing blue shorts and walking along, avoiding the dogs and emptying the blue mailboxes for years. i love to walk all over and to get paid while walking a route through the year and through the snows and rains and suns seemed and still seems to be wonderful thing. where else on earth can you get a job that enables one to wear a blue pith helmet and is still not frowned upon?
the trouble was and is, getting into the us postal service. the idea of doing something that can be frustrating, humbling and not very exciting to many people would seem to suggest that getting my foot in the door would be easy. the mails are always being delivered and there is always work, no disaster of downsizing or inflation, for most people the 37 cents of a postage stamp is always affordable and thus, there would always be work for the lonely mailman, plodding through the city streets, trying not to get bitten or sunburnt or drowned in the rain while hand delivering your mail for less than the cost of a newspaper. i had no idea at the time, how insular the occupation was. the secret society of the blue eagle was a tough nut to crack.