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Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

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Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#111

Post by badpun »

noir_lord wrote: post #76
macspoofing wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a local reporter who went undercover to do an expose on the temp-agency market and worked a few days on the factory line at a food supplier. Her verdict: It wasn't very fun. Grass is always greener. People also tend to want their jobs to provide meaning to their lives. That is a luxury. For most people, a job is something you do to enable the rest of your life.

I've worked in factories and greenhouses (they tie for first place in awfulness, in factories it was 12 hour shifts in full PPE dipping steel ladders into hot degreaser - in greenhouses it was 10-12 hour shifts in 50C+ heat). Neither was fun but they are very different to a 9 hour stint programming, when I worked physical jobs I could go home, have a shower and still had the energy to go out socialising where now whe…

You’re lucky, I pretty much have energy for books only in the weekend (unless it’s something really easy and interesting), on weekdays books are usually too taxing for my post-coding mental state.

Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#112

Post by DoreenMichele »

colechristensen wrote: post #100

Responses to stories like this make me uncomfortable. I grew up on a small family farm in Iowa. Along with farming my father also took a substitute job as a rural mail carrier mostly for health insurance. I can't find a better word than fetishizing to describe how – what I would call city people – think and talk about the world I grew up in. Talking about where I came from and reading how people respond to this makes…

I didn't read the whole thing, but I read enough to get the sense that it is a story about a place in America that still has a real sense of community. Many people today don't really have that anymore and desperately long for it.

My father grew up on a farm and was part Cherokee. My mother is an immigrant. I grew up some kind of sense of community and spent most of my adult life not really finding that again.

I have a history of fostering phenomenal growth for online communities of a certain size which then often seem to collapse and become a shadow of their former selves after I leave. I think it has to do with me being able to foster a real sense of community and no one else seems able to sustain that in my absence.

I typically leave because of being treated abusively, basically. I'm never seem to be given credit for what I am doing for the community. People seem unable to recognize what I do and seem to have no idea how to relate to me in a positive, constructive manner when I am actively fostering a sense of community, which is something I seem to just have a knack for, having grown up with certain things.

So I think people just long for a sense of community and it very often comes out in weird ways.

That doesn't mean your discomfort is unjustified. It's completely justified.

I'm just making an observation about a phenomenon and hopefully that will be somehow useful or meaningful information for someone reading the comments here.

Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#113

Post by badpun »

zackbloom wrote: post #39
snarf21 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to separate your work from your purpose. Think of work as merely collecting resources to maintain life. Get a hobby or volunteer at a charity and find purpose there. I've been much happier with putting my "self" into designing and testing board games. I forget about the dumpster fire after I leave and focus my energy on something I enjoy creating.

This is a little dystopian to me. You absolutely can have a job which pays you to build things you think matter.

How many coders can have such jobs? 5%? 10%? Probably not more... For the rest of us, you either find satisfaction in the craft itself, or outside work.

Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#114

Post by kasey_junk »

xeromal wrote: post #98
kasey_junk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story takes place in Atlanta. The metro area has something like 6 million people in it. Not a 'mega city' but also not a small town. Perhaps it's not the city that is causing the lack of community with neighbors?

This happens in Marietta which is a sizeable city but not Atlanta. It's outside of Atlanta like how Irvine is outside of LA. My family lives in Acworth an hour a way and there are chickens wandering people's yards. GA is a bit different in that regard.

My upstairs neighbors in the mid rise apartment I lived in raised chickens on their porch, was fairly normal to have one wander down to my deck. I don't have a point other than to point out these days chickens are not a signal of the sticks.

Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#115

Post by tdhoot »

lupire wrote: post #105

I'm curious what sort of magic made her know it was his last day, and move her to document the day like that. Things like this are beautiful but I don't know how to create them in my life. It it down to an inherent personality type?

Seems like everyone in the community knew. Seems reasonable considering the personal relationship he had with everyone.

Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#116

Post by badpun »

the_gastropod wrote: post #110
ryandrake wrote: post #73

Happy story, but I'm also supremely jealous. The thought of retiring after only 35 years of work! That's the outstanding accomplishment here. Either he has a great pension (remember those?) or has been a terrific, disciplined saver over those years. My Boomer parents all had generous pensions and they also retired pretty early. Us younger folks are stuck with crappy 401(k)s that place our futures in the hands of Wall…

The number of work years needed before you can retire can entirely be determined by the % of your take-home pay you save. For example, to retire in 35 years (assuming a 0 net-worth), you need to save 21.5% of your money. If you're on HackerNews, you probably have a high enough salary where that's absolutely doable. Bump it up to 35%, and you can knock another decade off of your working career. You can play around wit…

This page, like all FIRE stuff, is making rather positive assumptions about the ROI on savings (they’re assuming 5% over inflation). I, for my calculations, am personally assuming 0% growth - I just don’t want to end on a street when I’m 65 or 75.

Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#117

Post by dawnerd »

sxates wrote: post #54
phkahler wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO regular mail is subsidizing all the junk mail. They offer bulk rates based on the assumption that delivery is already paid for.

It's actually the other way around. The junk mail is paying for your mailman to come by every day. The $.50 for a stamp doesn't cover the cost of delivering a letter.

Also people paying retail rate for packages help offset as well. I've been shipping a lot recently and it's crazy the price difference.

Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#118

Post by ska »

badpun wrote: post #109
maxxxxx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Sometimes I feel like I am wasting my life solving business problems I don’t really care about and nobody close to me understands even remotely.

Read Bukowski’s „Post Office”. In his account, working in the post office, or as a mailman in the field, was hell.

I'm not sure I would take Bukowski's take as normative on anything at all.

Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#119

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mcflibbles wrote: post #49

I worked as a postman for a bit. I'd wake up at 0430, make a short commute, then sort letters into street/house number order for something like 3 hours. After the first few days this became mindnumbingly dull. It was obvious 90% of what I was about to deliver would go straight in the bin so all this drudgery wad largely pointless. For a while I worked in a pretty rough area (by UK standards, admittedly nowhere in the…

Junk mail is bulk sorted, at least in the states, so ya, it’s probably going in the bin, but sorting it shouldn’t be an issue.

Re: Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow

#120

Post by seanmcdirmid »

benj111 wrote: post #84
mcflibbles wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no doubt lots of people are closely connected to their local community through kids friends, their kids schools, their kids sports teams, etc. But having kids only as a means to talk to people would be a bit drastic!

Well I did also have kids so I wouldn't look so dodgy hanging around by the play equipment in the park, so it wasn't just as a means to speak to people ;)

Having a two year old, no one looks at me weird when I play with the duplo blocks at the local LEGO store.
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