After being thrown out of my job in publishing by mediocre tyrants in thrall to a twisted ideology, I went four months unemployed but recently secured temporary work at the Royal Mail doing Christmas sorting. Echoing Charles Bukowski, here’s what I’ve found there.
Everyone is very nice. Or at least, they are real – unlike many in media. The job itself is hard, or at least physically hard – on your feet all day, you lug mailbags around, you move something from A to B and then to C and later D; you are a cog in the wheel; a sifter in the sifting process. The building is rough and ready and looks like it has barely altered in forty years: in the kitchen are encrusted, filthy mugs and signs warning about rats. Paint peels and much equipment is rusted.
The actual physical work is nearly relentless. Those saying the pension age should be raised above 67 should think again; this might be okay for someone who has sat in an office for most of their career, but when you’re doing a demanding job like this, the body breaks much sooner.
My fellow casual worker is Meso*, who moved to Britain from Zimbabwe in 1997 with his wife. I like him. Now 58, he goes between moderately paid jobs to help support his three children – two are now grown up, but still live at home with him and his wife, who works in the care sector. One of his previous jobs involved sorting newspaper deliveries between 3am and 7am. Next week he has a job interview which he’ll have to travel to Swindon to attend, though he’s not thrilled nor hopeful about the job on offer. He shrugs that he has little choice, he has to keep looking.
Meso is a good guy. Although I might not necessarily want him to read what I’ve written about immigration here, here and here, I stand by every word; I haven’t contradicted myself. It goes without saying that there is zero racial prejudice at the sorting office, or zero prejudice of any kind. Try telling that to the Leftist establishment who imagine it is everywhere in order to keep them accruing power and earning money. There is male-centric camaraderie in the depot, largely gone from offices, which now dance to a female-centric tune; I sense that, consequently, this work group feels more ‘together’.
During the so-called lockdowns (actually middle class people staying at home while working class people brought them things), this depot would have kept on going in the same manner as I see it now. The workers would have brought things to me, the then-laptop class, they had no choice. There are still a few scuffed stickers on the floor saying ‘Stay 2m away from others if possible’. But of course it was rarely possible, and the 2-metre ruling was completely arbitrary anyway.
There are posters and notices aplenty around but they’re about being a careful delivery driver or handling packages correctly, rather than celebrating queerness or telling you about worthy historical black people, as was oft the case at my previous workplace. As far as I can tell, Royal Mail doesn’t appear to have been beset by Woke ideology like the NHS, the police, the railways, the fire service, the banks and a thousand other institutions have been.
I chat with Pete, a guy in his late fifties, whose filthy sense of humour would have seen him reprimanded at my last job (“I’m not easily offended,” I tell him). He tells me he works this job and another at a supermarket, stacking shelves. He does that shift between 8am and noon, then comes into Royal Mail for five hours between 2 and 7pm. He’s been doing this for many years. He drives to his supermarket job, drives home when it finishes, has lunch, then cycles the three miles or so to his afternoon job.
He says he got into this work pattern because he needed to pay off credit card debts he’d accumulated. I ask him when he might retire. “I probably won’t, I’ll go on working!” Unprompted by me, he slags the government off, says they’re wrecking the jobs market. I volunteer that some people are seemingly better off not working and claiming benefits instead, which he agrees with: his neighbours “eat takeaways, drink, smoke, never want for anything” and are on benefits. This might all sound like a Reform UK recruiting ad but I’m not making it up.
I feel my back going a little, I tell him. Is this not a common thing? Andy says it can be, and he suffers pain but every morning swallows a couple of Ibuprofen and a couple of paracetamol. “I forgot this morning, though!” But of course he soldiers on.
I chat with Kev, who tells me that he was made redundant from his job in insurance a few years ago, didn’t work for four months, got bored, so decided to apply for a part-time job at Royal Mail. He is also a referee in Non-League football, sometimes reffing as many as eight matches a week. With me a Non-League aficionado, we get into a good chat about the game and grounds in the region. Last night he had to send off a youth player for giving him a volley of abuse.
A little Italian fellow, Rocco, comes in from the pouring rain and yells with a smile, “England is a great country with great people but your weather is sheeet!” Later I chat with him in the office. He’s been here 23 years, he tells me. It’s 7pm and after he’s just signed off after doing overtime; I ask what time he started today. 8.20am he says. “Long day!” I reply. “We used to start at 5 in the morning! But I like the overtime – you have to do it when you can,” he says. He’s pushing 60 and still wants to keep grafting, earning those precious extra few quid.
Pete is the guy in charge of putting packages and letters in the correct place when the drivers unload them from their vans. He tells me he dislikes doing this afternoon shift – he’d much rather be doing nights, which he used to, until that work was moved to Bristol. I ask him what the hours of his average night shift were. It varied, he says, but often it was ten hours straight. Didn’t that mess up your body clock and ruin your weekends? No, he says: he’s been doing it for 21 years, so was used to it.
The only woman on the floor most of the time is the lovely Ann, who tells me she’s been there for two years. Before that she was a teaching assistant. Why did she quit? “Because I was tired of being a punch bag,” she answers. She’d had enough of being told ‘little Johnny is always right’ and felt she couldn’t do her job properly. The metaphorical corpses the radical progressives leave in their wake are numberless.
Meso is with us and when Ann asks us both what we did before coming to the Royal Mail, he starts by telling her he came here from Zimbabwe in ’97. “Why on earth would you want to come to this country?!” she grins. “It was still great back then!” I remind her, and the three of us dovetail into a brief chat about how terrible the Budget was for jobs. I’ve found few friends of the government here.
The world seems like a different place when you view it through manual worker’s eyes as opposed to an office worker’s. We shouldn’t bring back National Service: we should make all teenagers do a week in a factory or a depot or a farm or a delivery job. That’d give ’em some perspective.
You’re so knackered by the day’s work you don’t have the time or inclination to do any political activism at the end of it (or cook more-than-basic meals).
These are workers who deserve rewards after the end of a shift. But their ‘betters’, the middle-class scalds, the Uniparty, have done their best to restrict their pleasures, whether they be smoking, Page 3, affordable beer in pubs, gambling, Benny Hill, two-for-one pizzas, cheap electricity…
The radio is often on in the depot, mainly tuned to retro stations. So that’s what Simon Mayo’s doing now! Hearing its anodyne mixture of DJs chatting with the suburban English listeners, traffic reports, weather updates, moronic ads and records you’ve heard a thousand times before, you almost feel like the last 30 years hasn’t happened. All appears to be normal in modern Britain. Then there are the news broadcasts – for the best part of a decade I’ve hardly gone near mainstream news so it was enlightening to hear them. You’re informed that kind Ed Milliband has told energy suppliers that they must pass on the £150 cut in prices to customers or that caring Keir Starmer has declared war on child poverty (“critics say it doesn’t go far enough”). It’s whitewashed, dumbed-down, regime-approved (and regime-approving) slop.
Meanwhile in the outside world, there are the stories that barely make it onto broadcast media platforms: a man in Switzerland sent to jail for ten weeks for saying men and women have different skeletons; a teacher in Ireland jailed because he refused to call a boy pupil a girl; a fireman sacked for allowing the use of the word ‘firemen’; a woman arrested in the bath by 11 police officers for using the word ‘faggot’ in a personal text message; a Girl Guides leader expelled for saying the organisation shouldn’t allow boys in. Meanwhile, our glorious government is delaying elections they knew they would lose for two years; ending trial by jury for swathes of cases; allowing the NHS to go ahead with chemically castrating children; wants facial recognition tech everywhere; is planning digital ID for every British person.
I suspect little of this tyranny would have registered with my fellow workers; in fact, if you told them much of the above, they probably wouldn’t believe it.
What a world away this is from my previous job, where I’d waste hours and hours going over my reports’ pointless SMART goals, be stuck in meetings about respecting pronouns, suffer Slack messages from non-binary people in HR reminding us that covid was still around, or be greeted by the latest race and sexuality propaganda put up around the building. These luxury belief symbols, these symptoms of decadent 21st century Woke capitalism at the end of its tether, are absent here. This place is about graft, about doing a proper job with a proper outcome: delivering objects to people.
When my former colleagues were grabbing themselves a slice of Pride pizza, these guys were working their socks off to make sure when those media types awoke the following morning their latest earbuds had dropped through their letterbox. The tosser class don’t know they’re born.
*I’ve changed all the names in this article.
Russell David is the author of the Mad World Substack.
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A profoundly thought-provoking article, for which much thanks to Russell David.
My heart went out to each and every one of his co-workers (and his good self) because they are the salt-of-the-earth people who really do matter. Real people doing an honest day’s work.
Coincidentally, yesterday I had a parcel delivered by the “postie” – an elderly gentleman, all smiles, asking me to use one of those little devices to sign my name with my finger and which I can never get to sign my name properly. We both laughed at my struggle and in the end he accepted by indecipherable scribble. I thanked him for the delivery, said I always prefer to get parcels via Royal Mail rather than the other private companies, and that yesterday I had two returns uplifted (first time I’ve requested that option – no need to print a label, the postman brings one with him). The postie had come to collect them first thing and took the two parcels promptly and efficiently (I gave a rave review when the survey came by email shortly afterwards). When I praised them, “my” postman – ever smiling – said “We do sometimes get things right!” to which I replied, that in my experience that was most of the time.
I recall my sarcasm at the outset of the Covid scam noting that it was a very odd virus, that certain things seemed to have been clear from the get-go, for example, that the mail would continue to be delivered as there was no danger from said odd virus there. How did they know that so quickly?
It was particularly interesting to learn about the radio news bulletins and an interesting reminder of how the majority of the population really don’t know what it actually going on in the world, the whitewashing of the “news” so successfully covering up the reality.
So, again, thanks for this article which is touching. These hard working people really are the VIPs of our society – good souls, underpaid and overworked. God bless them – and He will.
These traditional places of employment ought to have a preservation order placed on them. It’s unfortunately though only a matter of time before the HR wimmin, senior x,y,z officers and woke micky mouse degree graduates start to stick their oars in.
‘The tosser class’… Love it. I know a few.