Or “What I Have Been Doing For The Past Nine Years”

Browsing a couple of my last 2014 posts, I see that I was in that purgatory known as job hunting. Masses of resumes and covering letters, and barely even an acknowledgment from local employers. Not a good place to be. But it did change.

My first semi-success was with Canada Post. I’d applied for a Letter Carrier job and was asked to undertake an aptitude test. That all went well, and I was called for an interview, and that went well, too. The final hurdle was a physical test, which involved walking up and down stairs and lugging heavy mail carrier bags around. That, too, went well. There was, though, a fairly rigorous period of training to go through which entailed driving to Windsor daily for a couple of weeks, to be taught the finer points of carrying letters. It’s actually quite complex, with all manner of money to be collected, forms to be filled and electronic gizmos to carry around. I also did a week at the sorting office in Chatham and went out delivering real mail, with a mentor. I was getting paid, too. The bit where I said it was a semi-success came when we had to do a sortation test at the end of the training. A one-off, pass or fail, test of speed and accuracy in sorting 120 letters. Despite being given a huge amount of practice time I failed, as did a number of my fellow trainees. I was crushed because I thought I had it in the (mail) bag, and what did sorting matter when the bulk of mail in Chatham arrived pre-sorted? Well it did matter, thanks to the Union contract. I was paid off by a sad looking man who told me that they had already earmarked a right-hand drive delivery vehicle to me because being British I’d know how to drive it. There’s a bit more to this, but I’ll press on with my next semi-success.

Semi-success number two was when I applied to be a “Custodian”, or caretaker, with the local school board. The money wasn’t great and the jobs were just emergency cover, but how hard would it be to operate a rotary polisher? I was asked to attend an interview, lectured about the limited nature of the job and sent on my way with a promise of a call so that I could attend again and do “a cleaning test”. For a job with poor pay and even poorer prospects I really didn’t think I needed to be doing tests, so I gently dropped that one. It was a bit harsh, too, because I’d applied for office work at the school board, my stock-in-trade, but never even had an acknowledgment.

I registered in a programme for older people looking for work, with the specific rider that I wouldn’t consider a job at the local Call Centre, a place that had a higher turnover of staff than players at Chelsea FC. I really did not need to work in the modern equivalent of a sweat shop. Lo and behold I had a call from the Call Centre asking me to come for interview, which was odd as I’d never applied for a post there. I asked how they had my name and number and it was, of course, through the older workers programme. Initially I agreed to an interview, but later called and cancelled, and the response I got was, to put it politely, frosty.

My full success was my long-forgotten application to drive a School Bus (training free, but unpaid). I will talk about that in a later post, but suffice it say that I did drive a school bus, and more, for seven years. I learned a lot, but perhaps the best lesson was to know when it was time to retire.

I promised a return to the Canada Post job, and this is it. In the cold February of 2015, I was driving my school bus down Indian Creek Road and saw my Letter Carrier mentor delivering mail in the snow and seriously sub-zero temperatures. I stopped to say hello and he looked up at me and asked if it was warm on the bus. I said it was, and he said “you have the better job”. Maybe failing the sortation test wasn’t as bad as I’d thought.