Working

by Studs Terkel

  I’m doing a job that’s my life ambition. When I was in school, you said in the yearbook what you’re most likely to be. I did say mailman. First thing came to my mind. As a kid, when I was coming up, I didn’t have any idea this would wind up as my chosen profession. It has.

  This is a profession that everyone has looked up to and respected. They always say, “Here comes the mailman”—pony express or something. This always brought a gleam to everybody’s eye. Everyone likes to receive mail. I feel it is one of the most respected professions that is throughout the nation. You’re doing a job for the public and a job for the country.

  It’s getting to a point where it’s payin’ now. Used to be they didn’t pay’em much. Everyone thought the mailman was making much more than he makes, “Aw, you got a good job, you’re makin’ lots of money.” What it takes to live, you’re barely scraping it, just barely getting along.

  You find that most people in the post office have two jobs. Some of ’em have three jobs. I have had two most of the time. Now I only have one. My wife, she’s working. If she wasn’t, I don’t know how we’d make it.

  Now the top is eleven thousand dollars. This is just the last couple of years, they’d progressed to that status. For quite a while, the top was only in the seven thousand bracket. A mailman, breaking in, he makes somewhere along $3.60 an hour. This is subs. They progress somewhere about seven cents a year.

  Everybody in the post office are moonlighting. We have a lot of men in the post office and their wives also in the post office. There are more women carriers today. And they’re doing a bang-up job. It’s a fabulous job for a woman. At the eleven-thousand-dollar bracket after eight years, it’s a nice piece of change for a woman.

  My day starts at four o‘clock. I hit the floor. At five thirty I’m at work. We pull mail from the cases that the night clerks have thrown. I start casin’, throwin’ letters. At my station we have fifty-three carriers. Each one has a pigeonhole that his mail goes in. You are constantly pulling mail out of these pigeonholes.

  I have one big office building downtown and a smaller one. Each firm is a case. As you work on a case, you get to know the people who get personal mail. You throw it to that firm. I have sixty different outfits in the building that I service. Downtown is much easier than the residential district. You could have about 540 separations in the residential. I know about ninety percent of the people in the office building. We are on a first name basis.

  I make two trips a day. The mail is relayed by truck. I get over to the building, I unsack it and line it up according to various offices. Then I start my distribution, floor by floor. We have twenty-three floors in this building. I take the elevator up to the fifteenth, and as I go up, I drop the mail off on each floor. Then I walk down and make the distributions. Later, I get the upper floors.

  The various people I meet in the building, we’re constantly chatting, world affairs and everything. You don’t have a chance to go off daydreaming. My day ends about two ’. During the day I might feel sluggish, but at quitting time you always feel happy.

  I worked residential six months and flew back downtown. (Laughs.) Quite a bit more walking there. I had one district that covered thirty-two blocks. In a residential district you have relay boxes. It’s a large brown box, which you probably see settin’ on a corner next to the red, white, and blue box. You have a key that will open this. You have maybe three relay boxes in your district. You can run about twenty-five miles a day. If I had a pedometer, I’d be clocked around ten on this job.

  Walking is good for you. It keeps you active. You more or less feel better. The bag’s on my shoulder with me at all times. It varies from two pounds to thirty-five—which is the limit you’re supposed to carry. The shoulder’s not affected. Just keep goin’, that’s all.

  Constantly you walk. You go home and put your feet in a hot basin after. That feels good. About twice a week, you give ‘em a good soakin’. When I’m home, I keep ‘em elevated, stay off ’em as much as possible, give ‘em a lot of rest. I wear out on the average about three or five pairs of shoes a year. When I first started the bag, seemed like I was carryin’ a ton. But as you go along, the bag isn’t getting any lighter but you’re getting accustomed to it.

  When I come home, I walk in the door, turn the one-eyed monster TV on, take my uniform off, sit on the couch to watch a story, and usually go to sleep. (Laughs.) Around six, seven o‘clock, my wife comes home. “You tired?” “Somewhat.” So I watch TV again with her and eat dinner. Nine thirty, ten o’clock, I’m ready for bed.

  If you’ve got a second job, you get off at two, hustle and bustle off to that second job. You get off from there eight, nine o‘clock and you rush home, you rush to bed. Sleep fast and get up and start all over again. I’ve had a second job up until last year. I tried to get away from walkin’ on that one. To find something wherein I was stationary in one spot. But most of my part-time jobs have always been deliveries. I was on the move at all times. If I hadn’t been on the move, I would probably be asleep on the job. Moving about on my feet kept me awake.

  Most things a carrier would contend with is dogs. You think he won’t bite, but as soon as you open the door the dog charges out past the patron and he clips you. This is a very hectic experience for the mailman. On a lot of residential streets, you have dog packs roaming, and a lot of times you don’t know whether the dog is friendly or not. You try to make friends with him in order that you won’t be attacked. In some cases, he’ll walk your district with you. He’d walk this block with you. When you reach the corner, he’d turn back and go home. (Laughs.) You got a vicious dog, he chases after you.

  (Sighs.) There’s more dogs nowadays. Yes, they have dogs that’s always out. Oh, I’ve been attacked. (Laughs.) I’ve had several instances where dogs have made me jump fences. One was over in a vacant lot. I was about a hundred yards from him. I was doing steps and coming down. I’m watching him, and he’s evidently watching me. As I pass this lot, here he comes! It’s a middle-class white area. The woman, she was walking down the street. She musta knew the dog. She called him by name and shooed at him. Shot mace at him. (Laughs.) She come up and said, “I’m sorry he’s bothering you.” She spoke to him and told him to go and he went off.

  Most people have the mailman pretty well timed as to what time he’ll be around. You have old lady pensioners. You have ADC. They’re constantly waiting for checks. They’re always waiting. If they miss you on this block, they will run around to the next block. “Mailman, you got my check?” (Laughs.) You know it’s not there ‘cause you know what you have. “Look in the bag again. It might be mixed up with somebody else’s mail.” You look anyway to make ’em feel good. You know who are getting checks. Therefore you have to be ready for ’em. Interesting life.

  I’ll work until retirement. I have the years of service but I don’t have the age. Last year they made a special package. We could get out at twenty-five years of service and fifty-five years of age. I need seven more years. Retirement pays anywhere from $250 to $300 a month. Not much. That’s why quite a few of ’em didn’t go.

  With thirty years of service, you can go up to seventy years of age. If the retirement’s right, I’ll not be here. At retirement, I’ll be looking for another job where it wouldn’t be life and butter. This other job would be just a supplement. I’m thinkin’ about goin’ in business for myself. So when I reach my reclining years I wouldn’t have to work so hard.

  Ever talk about your day’s work with your wife?

  No. She has enough problems of her own.

  CONRAD SWIBEL

  He is a gas meter reader. He has been at it for about a year. He is twenty-four, married. “I have a kid comin’ July twenty-eighth. The first one. It’ll be pretty exciting.”

  Reading gas meters, it’s kind of a strenuous business. You have to do a lot of running around. Today I had a real bad book. It was crummy, ’cause I did Wilmette,44 kinda the older homes. The houses are on an acre, half-acre plots, and you do a
lot of walking. They call it juice if you got a good day. You got a juice book, a real good book. Today I didn’t have a juice book. If I have all outside meters, I can read a hundred meters, which is a hundred homes, in an hour. I was doing maybe thirty-five in an hour today.

  With the big homes, half of them will be in Florida. They have beautiful homes. I’d like to own a home like that, yeah. You usually go to the back door. I’ll ring the doorbell, then I’ll knock. I knock too loud, she’ll get on me. If I just ring the doorbell and don’t knock, they’ll say, “Why didn’t you knock?” You get it all the time. If I knock, I get it. If I don’t knock, I’ll get it. Maybe eight out of ten homes, their doorbells don’t work. Sometimes they’re good enough to put a little sign up: Doorbell doesn’t work, please knock.

  You have the blue shirt with the gas company on a patch. During the wintertime they give you a badge, with your ID picture and all that. That helps you get in. They try to keep us on the same route so people will get used to you. People are suspicious.

  They have some colored people who work for the gas company. They’ll have the police called in on ’em almost every day they’re out there. They’ll have an older woman and she’ll say, “Oh my God, a colored person!” She’ll think he’s breaking into the house. They have these big Afros. I have a nice face, so they don’t bug me. The colored gas meter readers get fol-lowed all the time when they go down in the basement—which slows you up. They ask, “You read it that quick? Come back here and read it again.” Wow, I read it, leave me alone.

  In Evanston I do the colored section and the white section. Maybe five out of ten colored homes would have dogs, where eight out of nine or ten white homes would have dogs. The worst ones are the schnauzers and the poodles. They’ll bite you in the knee or in the leg. Almost every time you’ll go into a house, they jump on ya and sniff ya and if you do three hundred homes a day, it gets aggravating.

  I’ve been bit once already by a German shepherd. And that was something. It was really scary. It was an outside meter the woman had. I read the gas meter and was walking back out and heard a woman yell. I turned around and this German shepherd was comin’ at me. The first thing I thought of was that he might go for my throat, like the movies. So I sort of crouched down and gave him my arm instead of my neck. He grabbed a hold of my arm, bit that, turned around. My arm was kinda soft, so I thought I’d give him something harder. So I gave him my hand. A little more bone in that. So he bit my hand.

  I gave it to him so he wouldn’t bite my throat. I didn’t want him to grab hold of my face. He turned around again and by that time—they usually give you a three-cell flashlight, a pretty big one—I had that out and caught him right in the mouth. And he took the flashlight away from me. I jammed it in his mouth and he just ripped it away. I jumped a six-foot fence tryin’ to get away from him, ’cause then I had my senses back. It was maybe in five seconds this all happened.

  Were you badly hurt?

  No. Just a hole right here in my arm. (Indicates a livid scar.) I was cussin’ pretty good, too. She was tryin’ to call the dog back, which made me turn around. Otherwise he’d probably got me in the back. I’m just glad I turned around.

  You can usually tell if a dog’s gonna bite ya. You’re just waitin’ for him to do somethin’ and then you can clobber him. The gas company’ll stay behind you in that kind of thing. That’s the biggest part of a dog’s day, when the gas man comes. (Laughs.)

  I’ve gone into houses where the woman will say, “Let me grab the dog. I don’t want you to give him a hard time.” I’ve had one house where I was trying to make friends with the dog. He was a schnauzer. I started to walk away because it was just barking its little fool head off. It just fell over on its side. I thought it had a heart attack. She said, “He usually relapses from barking too much.” She gave me a glare like it was my fault.

  Usually they’ll say, “Don’t hit the dog.” If it’s bad enough, I usually hit him in the head with the flashlight, to knock it away. Then they’ll say, “Why did you hit it? The dog’s not gonna bite you.” I say, “It’s jumping on me, it’s scratching me.” And she says, “All it’s doing is scratching you?” It’s weird. It’s not biting me, it’s scratching me. (Laughs.) So that’s okay.

  When nobody’s looking . . . ?

  You kick him down the stairs usually. (Laughs.) Usually the dog will follow you down the stairs or back up. That’ll give you a good chance,’cause the dog’ll try to pass you. So you would kick him down the stairs. (Laughs.) Even if he just follows you down the stairs you try to get him for the one you missed a couple of houses back. Many people will report you if you abuse a dog. But what about me?

  People complain to the company for jumping over their fence or going across their grass. I usually don’t jump fences any more unless I’m in a hurry. The boss is usually nice about it. It’ll get to him and he’ll say, “Okay, it won’t happen again.” They mark down a code nine in the book: Do not cross the lawn or do not jump the fence. Older people that take care of their lawns don’t like nobody to cross their lawns—which is kind of weird.

  I got a good letter one time, not that I’ve gotten bad ones. I really deserve maybe six to ten letters. Maybe a woman was crippled in the house and I’ll waste five, ten minutes of my time, and I’ll say, “I’ll give you a cup of coffee.” And they’ll say, “Thanks a lot,” and I’m on my way. What would it hurt to write in and say this guy really helped me out?

  They don’t want to be bothered to come to the door. They’d rather have something else to do than answer the doorbell and let the gas man in. Why can’t they say, “I don’t want to admit you in my home at the present time cause it’s dirty?” I can tell you something. Most of the houses are dirty, they’re filthy. They stink. I have one woman, she’s got fifteen cats and she’s got ’em down in the basement. I’ll walk down there and walk right out without reading the gas meter. Yeah, white middle class. Even in Wilmette, high class. The outside of the house is kept nice, beautiful, but when you get inside, when you get into the heart of it, it’s filthy.

  One guy was reading gas meters for eight years. He went to buy furniture. The next day he was supposed to read the gas meter at the store. He wanted me to go in because he didn’t want the salesman to see him, to know that he was a gas meter reader. He was embarrassed. It doesn’t really matter what kind of job you do, as long as you’re working.

  The meter readers is the bread of the whole company. Without these people being billed and having the money come into the gas company, the other employees wouldn’t get paid. You have to know how to read a meter,’cause if you make a mistake, it could be maybe the guy would pay another hundred dollars more. It’s kinda tricky. There’s four dials. The company gives you a high and a low. Let’s say 3000 for the low and 5000 for the high. It’s usually about 4000, right dead in the middle. You have to go there and make sure they’re using the middle. I can read a meter from twenty, thirty feet away.

  There’s a guy been reading meters for eight or nine years now and he’s getting old. I can’t see doing it for eight years. I’d probably age incredibly. Because I’m bad with putting on weight anyway, and with this running I do. My wife bought me one of these walk-a-mile meters that you can put on your belt, little Japanese thing. I found out I walk about eight, ten miles a day. So I don’t have to worry about getting a heart attack for quite a long time. (Laughs.)

  I usually start reading meters at nine o‘clock and with an eight-hour day I’m usually done by noon. I’m pretty quick. You learn to pace yourself. Usually if they keep you on a book long enough, you can tell if the people are home and which is a good home to miss, ’cause if the people give you a bad time, you say, “We’ll catch you in a couple of months.” If they took maybe a little too much time to peek through the window, I’m off. I’m rushed and they’re rushed.

  My boss and the boss before him were meter readers and they would have the same book as I had. What was usually an eight-hour day took them four hours,
so they’re not gonna rat on me. Five years ago, they were doing the same thing. It’s more or less going through the ranks. Like you’re a private, then private first class. You have to go up that way.

  When I get home I’m usually calling out numbers to myself. Usually four numbers. Like the last house I read: 2652. I’ll be home and I’ll be going 2652, 2652, 2652. It’ll just be going through my mind: 2652. Like a song you hear too much.

  “When I was a little kid I wanted to be a baseball pitcher. I went through Little League, Pony League, and went to college for a year and a half, when I got drafted. Baseball would have been nice. Good yearly sum.” (Laughs.)

  The gas company’s really been good with the pay. Out of every two weeks I’ll make about $250 clear after taxes—which isn’t bad. For being there a year, that’s real good—and working half a day. Every couple of months they’ll put in a nickel or a dime more. You don’t even have to ask ’em.

  We’re starting to get young guys in now. The older you get, the more chance you have of being promoted. Over twenty-six we’ll say as being old. We have from eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They start flourishing at twenty, twenty-one. What they’re trying to do is get married people. They don’t want to hire eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds. Because they have a thing called curbing, where a guy could sit in his car and mark the numbers down themselves. Take an estimate reading. The computer would catch him, but it would maybe take three, four months. By that time, the guy would have six, eight hundred bucks and he’ll go work in a gas station or whatever. They just want somebody with responsibilities.

  There’s big rumors going around that they’ll be able to call your phone number and it’ll divert to the gas meter, and the reading will come through on the telephone. I hope by that time I’ll be in a different field. But I like it for now.