My Lifelong Association with Royal Mail and the Postal Service
My association with Royal Mail began in about 1985 when I was about 8 years old and I lived with my family in Central London. We were invited to a tour of the sorting office in W1 where we lived and I remember being fascinated by the machines and seeing all the guys at work.
I never dreamed that I would be a postman of any kind. I liked them and they let me start the little underground mail train. In those days they quite leftist so the postmaster invited us into his office and we had genuine Russian Caviar on melba toasts.
The Scout Postal Service Witham, Essex, GB Christmas 1988.
When I moved to Witham in Essex after my parents divorced in 1986. I joined the 3rd Witham Scout Troop (St Nicholas) and they started a postal service to legally compete with Royal Mail and help the postman deliver Christmas Cards to the local community.
They allowed us to compete with their monopoly to earn money for our troop and learn about the profession of being a postman.
We set up our own collection boxes around the town, collected the mail sorted it into walks and delivered it ourselves with our parents helping it was all really fun in those days.
The Best of 5 Experiences as a Professional Postal Worker
Experience One: Christmas Casual Royal Mail 1998 at Clarendon Way Sorting Office, Colchester, UK.
This sorting office was the main sorting hub for Colchester but they built the new delivery office and closed it down. They kept it open that Christmas and we were the last people to use it professionally.
My first ever paid job experience.
The Christmas Casual Job 1998 was my first ever paid job. I sorted letters and flats which are large letters and did some sorting of parcels into sacks for delivery to other hubs. I did the late shift in the afternoon.
After striking camp for the last time we all went down and had drinks together in what was then The Norfolk pub on North Station Road in my hometown of Colchester.
Clarendon Way sorting office then became a kids creche for working mums called Go Bananas!
Experience 2: Christmas Casual Royal Mail 2000, Whitehall Road Industrial Estate Temporary Sorting office Colchester, UK.
A large temporary sorting office was set up on the Whitehall Road in 2000 and I sorted packets there into sacks the same as I had done in 1998. I think I did lates and might have done a night shift at the end extra for the money.
It was mainly extra cash that was the motivation this time rather than starting my career. I was working for Boots as an Operations Assistant Part Time for 10 hrs week and wanted some extra cash for Christmas before starting a new job in Telesales.
We had no official sorting office in Colchester any more so they just set one up to process the Christmas traffic.
Experience 3: Christmas Casual South East Anglia Mail Centre (SEMC), Springfield, Chelmsford UK, 2018.
This was a big mail hub for the whole of East Anglia near Chelmsford. Where I was employed on a night shift from 10:30 to 06:30 in the morning.
I weighed 106 kilos at the start of the exercise the heaviest I’d ever been I lost 14 kilos in 2 months on that night shift and it saved my life because I was dying of poor diabetic control. So, I’m very greatful to Royal Mail for that opportunity losing that weight saved my life and I’ve never been back over 100 kilos since thank God!
Box Segregation (Box Seg) was my allocated job.
Basically, it was sorting trays of mail shots flats and regular mail to send to the machines and hand sorters when it comes in fresh in postal containers called Yorks.
At first, I could barely lift a single tray with both arms and by the end of it I had had had my Spinach and plopped to full trays of mail shots on the top of the cage ready to go. I’ve never felt more the man than that Christmas.
I enjoyed my Christmas dinner in the canteen and you could always get a bowl of chips to keep you going on your big break half way through. All told I made about 3500 GBP in 2 months doing 40hrs work with a few additional shifts.
One day it was satisfying to smash 130 cages of mail that means sort them or seg them out as they say in the trade in 3 hrs from 03:30 am to shift end at 06:30. I felt really cool for smashing that and delighted that they were all going to get their Christmas post on time as end users. It was like going to the gym at 3am and doing endless crunchies. I’d never been fitter after that.
It paid for my new hand-made German electric violin and my trip to the Next Classical Music Conference in Rotterdam in May 2019.
Experience 4: Christmas Casual South East Anglia Mail Centre (SEMC), Springfield, Chelmsford UK, 2019.
This year I swapped my See it. Seg it. Sort it for my See it. Scan it. Sort it.
I was transferred over onto bulk parcels or bulks. You have to push the work in from the lorry lanes, and sort it into cages for further delivery to minor Essex hubs or other mail centres.
I was mostly on the SS postcodes, so that’s anything for the Southend area but I had to help out with CM and CO to Chelmsford and Colchester postcodes.
You have to pair your bluetooth scanner and scan every parcel as you go that seg it into a cage.
If the cage such as the Wickford gets to full you you have to whip it out and replace it with an empty one. As you do.
In the end it all gets like the hand held game Mario Brothers with all the parcels falling off the end of the conveyor.
I spent a day on deliveries at Sudbury after that just for the experience.
Experience 5: Christmas Casual at Eastgates Delivery Hub, Colchester, UK 2023.
I just helped out for a month this time mainly clearing the backlog on the Coggershall for the Christmas rush and prepping the rounds for the regular postman. A little segging to not too much.
The hardest ones to sort are the Peldon farms because they have not postcode still and are done on names alone, but I| invented a system to get them done faster.
You pre sort the farms into street names of farms on the same road. The you only have to search that road on the frame and not the whole frame and I managed to seg it out.
I sued the money for this to pay the balance for my Audio Engineering distance learning Diploma in Germany which I’ve now passed (see my Media Arts blog for further details.