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Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow
- philshem 7y agoThis is a beautiful side of the US.
- always4getpass 7y ago*humanity
- DisruptiveDave 7y agoThis is fucking beautiful. At the same time it makes me a little sad to work at a desk, hidden from all the people my work impacts. In a city and time where neighbors keep their heads down when they pass each other and all the mailpersons wear headphones.
- badpun 7y agoThe people our work impacts (at least directly) are often „disrupted” (made redundant) by the new tech. It’s a good thing they don’t know us by name.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoEnglish being my second language, I picked up vocabulary from random places. The word "disrupt" will forever be associated for me with "disruptor", a weapon for "disrupting" the matter of ships and people, used by murderous Klingons and backstabbing Romulans.
- nemo1618 7y agoStories like this make you question whether it's worth being paid all this money to spend your life staring at a screen in a climate-controlled cube solving abstract problems that provide approximately zero benefit to your family, friends, and neighbors.
- callesgg 7y agoIt's not and you know it. But yet here we are.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoEveryone finds their freedom when they're ready to.
- unixhero 7y agoWhat's that? Secret Life of Walter Mitty? I live for my long holidays.
- maxxxxx 7y agoAgreed. 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.
- pknopf 7y agoThis is all very depressing. I got a kid on the way too, I need to reinvent myself.
- macspoofing 7y agoThere 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.
- noir_lord 7y agoI'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 when I get in I just want to veg with a book as I'm mentally spent. Some of it might be to do with age but I switched careers in my mid-20's and it was the same at the start of my programming career. It doesn't get easier, you just get better.
- dccoolgai 7y agoI can't articulate exactly why, but this is beautiful. I see it as an example of what social media should have been and hopefully what it still might become some day.
- criddell 7y agoIt is beautiful and it I don't think social media can ever be like that.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoJust think, for at least 25 of those years he's been driving the same truck.
- samfriedman 7y agoIndeed, the Grumman LLV is very well designed for longevity! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_LLV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_LLV
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoIt's a Chevy S10 that was spec'd with the reliable low power engine and a different body. It's not really anything special in terms of reliability. The post office simply committed to keeping them for 30yr then followed through. It helps that they were working with a purpose built commercial body and not an "engineered to a price point" stock truck body. Any other similar truck platform of the era would have fared similarly. The late 80s/early 90s were a time when the electronics of the 90s were coming to maturity but hadn't yet snowballed in sheer volume like they did in late 90s and early 2000s. In any other context the internet would be all "hurr durr, GM builds junk, muh indestructible Hilux because top gear". Goes to show you how much reputation and framing matters. In hindsight the best available platform of the late 90s/early 90s for sheer reliability (in postal use) would have been a 1st gen Explorer only because the front suspension is better suited to handling potholes and driving over curbs all day and the 31spl 8.8 rear axle is complete overkill for the application (all other differences are minor/negligible IMO).
- noir_lord 7y ago> The late 80s/early 90s were a time when the electronics of the 90s were coming to maturity but hadn't yet snowballed in sheer volume like they did in late 90s and early 2000s. A very valid point, the ECU's etc around 1990 got a lot of the benefit of having a modern ECU with a fraction of the complexity and a lot of them where bulletproof in design. Fascinating read on the history of computers in cars. http://www.chipsetc.com/computer-chips-inside-the-car.html http://www.chipsetc.com/computer-chips-inside-the-car.html
- Roritharr 7y agoYou don't have to be a mailman to transform your neighborhood closer to something as heartwarming as this. A good friend of mine worked as a programmer, then CEO, now Consultant... but in his spare time he'd spend all his energy on community projects, organizing everything, from Kids Halloween Tours in a small german city when that was very uncommon, to Developer Usergroups, to Startup Events to Barcamps, to TEDxs and so much more small and large. Without him my area simply wouldn't be the same and many people know. All it takes is just someone willing things like this into existence, over and over again.
- RandomBacon 7y agoDoes the community have a recognition program? Key to the city?
- vowelless 7y agoUnlike other commentators, this doesn’t make me feel bad about my cubicle job working on abstract problems. It does make me sad about living in a sterile mega city with no form of community with my neighbors. It makes me miss the days I used to live in a much smaller town, in my home land, where everyone knew each other, and we had shared festivals, feasts and fasts together. Thanks for sharing the twitter thread.
- kasey_junk 7y agoThis 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?
- wpasc 7y agoI disagree, having lived in large cities, everything always feels so impermanent and impersonal. Connections that should be easy to make with neighbors down the hall can feel more difficult than connections with neighbors down a driveway. I'm not sure what causes this phenomenon, but many people report feeling this way. No sources, but I've seen this notion circulate in articles and other forums.
- cortesoft 7y agoI wonder if it is because YOU are at an impermanent phase in your life. I live in Los Angeles, and would have said the same thing five years ago. However, in the last five years I have gotten married, had two kids, and bought a house. I feel much more connected to my location now. I have met my neighbors more than I ever did before buying a house, and have met many who have lived in the neighborhood for multiple generations. I feel like it takes making yourself more permanent before connections with neighbors become real.
- ianai 7y agoWhat do you mean by permanent? Having bought a house and married? Or creating a static environment for a child to grow up?
- ct520 7y agoWow this is awesome!
- mcflibbles 7y agoI 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 UK is really that dangerous compared to much of the world), and on several occasions I was harassed by members of the public. Though later I worked in a much nicer area and people were nice to me. I suspect the main thing about the story isn't how great it is to be a mailman, but how great it is to be good at people. I work from home and live in quite a nice community, but I only know a handful of people. This is basically because unless I have a common interest with someone I don't really have anything to say for myself. Clearly not something that afflicts Floyd!
- rafaelvasco 7y agoAbsolutely that's the lesson here. Spread love wherever you go, to everybody, anytime.
- phjesusthatguy3 7y ago>Spread love wherever you go, to everybody, anytime. Sometimes that really fucking hard. And I know I'm part of the problem. But if that's not what we're all working for, we might as well just give up now.
- awinder 7y agoSome of this is tied up in wishful thinking I’m sure, but focus on the macro and not the micro. I don’t think any of us can be the best version of ourselves without learning from the worst versions of ourselves. I’m sure that mailman had bad encounters; if not player 1 alert.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- benj111 7y ago
- chad_strategic 7y agoThis article makes me happy, oddly enough someone started cutting onions in my office. I hate when they do that! I'm going to continue to strive to be a good person, much like Floyd.
- ryandrake 7y agoHappy 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 Street and the stock market and other "figure it out yourself" investment vehicles. I feel like this is another ladder that's been pulled up after that generation reached the top.
- turtlebits 7y ago35 years of working for the Postal Service. He graduated in 1975, so thats 44 years, assuming he got a job after high school.
- VLM 7y agoOr in summary, assuming he graduated at 18, he's 62.
- lupire 7y agoYour perspective is deeply distorted. You have social security which is currently forecast to be funded 73% of current goals (not perfect but not 0 either), and 401(k) averages 7% return over decades, and you have massive quality of life improvements via technology thanks to boomers' collective work.
- the_gastropod 7y agoThe 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 with the numbers here: https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement
- MagicPropmaker 7y agoThere's something to be said with our Government personally reaching out to every resident and citizen, even if to just deliver a letter (yes, I know the USPS isn't quite the "Government" any more, but it's close). It makes us feel connected and part of something.
- kunjank 7y agoI love it. Goes to show that you can have a lasting impact no matter what job title you have.
- _bxg1 7y agoGood to see some wholesome content
- the_arun 7y agoThis is just awesome! Thanks for sharing @danso!
- colechristensen 7y agoResponses 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 me uncomfortable at times, and moreso it is incredibly difficult to actually communicate to people without context how life was because of their pre-existing impressions.
- lupire 7y agoCity people are "fetishized" too. People are often curious about people who are different from themselves.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoI 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.
- lupire 7y agoI'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?
- tdhoot 7y agoSeems like everyone in the community knew. Seems reasonable considering the personal relationship he had with everyone.
- danso 7y agoAs a former newspaper reporter who occasionally was assigned to do these kinds of community features (though nothing this well-done), I remember that editors and reporters would frequently get pitches (by email or call) from random folks – because newspapers routinely publish these kinds of stories, and this was well before social media was a viable place for sharing stories. The irony here is that the author is a newspaper reporter/editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and one of the most surprising things about this to me is how the AJC's website apparently didn't have this story in traditional article format. The only thing I see is a followup -- a recap of the original Twitter thread, with the update that Mr. Martin's GoFundMe went viral: https://www.ajc.com/news/think-and-smile-hundreds-celebrate-mailman-retirement/N6cdUdsNhn1Lq09wAF9sPL/ https://www.ajc.com/news/think-and-smile-hundreds-celebrate-... But when I think about it, I wonder if a traditional article (full of images) would have worked as well as the Twitter thread? I'm probably more tolerant of Twitter threads as a format than most people are, but this was one time in which the Twitter format – this includes the way we interact by scrolling through Twitter threads – really seemed to strengthen the material.
- wdyl 7y agoTwo questions: 1) Who cares? 2) What does this have to do with technology?