The Battle of Asheville: Death of a Mailman

READERS NOTE: The following story is an attempt to write in the 4th Person Perspective, where "we" are one with you.

03/12/2025

We worked the last 90 days for the Asheville USPS (West Asheville station) as a CCA (City Carrier Assistant) that one starts as. After the first 90 days you get more protection from the union and it's a lot harder to get rid of you. Though they don't tell you initially in training, CCA's have to commit to 12 hours a day, six days a week, including Sundays (for Amazon's extra deliveries they've deemed "non-profitable"). There is absolutely no work/life balance. Zero percent. You work, you come home, you eat something and you pass out, wake up and do it all over again. There are days - particularly on your sixth day in a row - where you have nothing left to give and still have to keep going. When this would coincide with a day where you were given a new route that you've never ran before - and you had to solve that puzzle that no one gave you the answers for - it would always be one of the toughest days of your life. 

This could potentially go on for up to a year or two on average, until you become a "regular." At that time you would get your own route that you stick to every day and take good care of as you start to become the nice guy mailman who gets to know all his customers and become a welcome addition to the community. The carriers will tell you that, "Everything gets better after the first 90 days," and that, "You'll be a regular in no time." Overall, for the majority of the 90 days, you're given this impression that the Post Office really needs you, as less and less people are willing to go through the grueling process that earns you your keep. Along the way, I saw multiple CCA's come and go that you knew would not make it, and they can tell within the first 30 days whether you can do the job effectively or not. 

At the 30-day and 60-day mark, they did evaluations saying everything we did was satisfactory. There were multiple compliments along the way from both supervisors and carriers saying we were exceeding expectations. It was as if all the previous careers we had gave us the skills necessary to excel at this one.

Then suddenly, last Saturday, with exactly one week left to go before our 90 days was over, two supervisors pulled me into a side room and asked me why a route the day before took me 12-hours and I wasn't able to do my "tail-up" they had given me preemptively and had to bring it back? A "tail-up" is part of another route they didn't have a carrier to deliver that day - they were always shorthanded. The lone union rep who I've spoken to following my termination said that they know routes are going to take CCA's 12 hours instead of eight, and that that's pretty standard.

I explained to the supervisors that the day prior, I was at the top of the mountains on a cold day - the area where all the trees turn white - which tires you out more. I also had a near-death experience when my LLV (Long Life Vehicle - the old jeep-looking vehicles from as early as 1994) stalled on an icy downhill road and I lost brakes and steering, had to stop it with my emergency brake, and immediately realized that if that happened on any of the many curves with no guardrail, that I would not still be here today. I mentioned something about adrenal fatigue from this and the supervisor said, "I don't think this is the job for you." We were also on one of two routes in that zip code that get the most mail and is, like many routes in Asheville, a discombobulated mess of careless infrastructure and quirky bewilderment. People build homes wherever they want in this town and number them whatever the township says is okay. 

Sometimes a route takes several days to get down, and even when you do, it remains difficult and seemingly too much to do in a day since we clearly became the United States Parcel Service and have to account for usually over 100 packages a day that your parent and grandparent letter carriers never had to worry about.

They said we had to prove ourself that Saturday on that same route, and that they were now evaluating whether to keep me as a CCA after my 90 days were up. This was shocking and upsetting, so with no coffee, no breakfast, no breaks, and nothing but silence. focus and righteous indignation, we completed the route by 3:22 p.m. and had enough time before the day was over to do two tail-ups for carriers on other routes before 6 pm.

That was a Saturday, however, and the mail was light. After working another Amazon Sunday, Monday came around. Same route. Triple the mail. At least. "Wow, they really hit you," one carrier said. Three hampers full of stuff. Four and a half trays each of both flats (periodicals and large envelopes) and DPS (regular presorted mail). Before you leave each day, you check where your packages come off the conveyor belt sorter to see if you missed any and I had an entire full hamper still there. On top of that we had a tail-up they wanted me to do at the start of the day instead of the end, which was a first. I didn't get the truck loaded until 11:30 (We start at 7:30 am) and the supervisor comes out and throws one more bin at me to deliver to another carrier in a different zip code. It felt like a setup for me to fail to use as an excuse to fire me. It was.

We got back with only one package we had to scan as "No Access" as we didn't deliver it in time, and half a tray of DPS and flats, respectively. We were proud of how close we came to finishing. Another carrier who did not take a large enough tail-up from me and got back around the same time even tossed a SPR (small parcel) in with my flats to either simply not get in trouble himself or possibly because he was told to as part of the setup to try and get rid of me. We left it on the dock telling the clerk we're not touching it, and how messed up it was that someone would do that.

Thankfully, we had a day off the next day. Wednesday we came in ready to work. The supervisor assigned me to a route and then a minute later said we had to do my 90-day evaluation despite it being Day 88. Normally, we could ask for a union rep to be there with me in case it would result in disciplinary action, but she was busy training people that week. The supervisor said we were Unsatisfactory for Work Quantity, Work Quality and Dependability and had me sign the 90-day evaluation.

Multiple carriers had told me - concerning the prior Saturday warning meeting - that we had nothing to worry about and that they were just trying to light a fire under me. So we signed it. It was immediately followed by termination papers.

We refused to sign and went over to Tevon Wells the National Association of Letter Carriers President of Branch 248 - also a 28801 carrier - who simply told me, "I'm not your representative."

On a side note, we need to add that after former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced he would resign in February, there was a speech given by Wells - not the supervisors or station manager or Postmaster - to address it. He said that if anyone spoke of striking or work stoppage they would be fired. If ever there was a time to strike it was then. On top of everything, the unions had failed to secure raises for two years for the carriers and talks were in arbitration. And since when do Union Presidents threaten employees with termination?

Now back to our termination...

Normally, if someone is fired on their 90th day, a union rep might tell you, "Just go home and we'll get you a job as a carrier or clerk in a different station tomorrow," according to another carrier. So there was clearly no interest in retaining me. This was all happening in front of the entire staff and was embarrassing. We felt we should stand our ground until we had a union representative - as we were told we had the right to do - and another supervisor immediately called the police to remove me.

You're surrounded by this new family in this new home you had earned your keep in, with all these people who taught you so much, and once again, like many jobs before, you don't even get to say goodbye and thank them. You might as well not even be human. You might as well drop out of the American workforce.

And that's what we are doing.

This job was supposed to be my working-class redemption story where a man makes good of his life through honest, hard work to make up for a restaurant industry that had chewed him up and spit him out over and over again for twenty years.

Two days later, we saw in the news that 10,000 employees are being cut from the USPS next month, thanks to a partnership with a fake and illegal new government department (DOGE) that never followed the Constitutional procedures for creation by the United States Congress and its legislation that should have occurred.

We remind every USPS employee that you are an independent federal agency whose service is guaranteed by the same U.S. Constitution that you took an oath to protect.

They most likely got some mandate from some corporate swine sitting behind a desk making six figures for doing nothing, who figured that not all of the 10,000 employees they hope to cut will take the early retirement package, and they better preemptively supplement those cuts by cutting those still in their 90 day probationary period that aren't protected by the union.

If anyone should go, it's the supervisors. They are absolutely and completely unnecessary. They could easily be replaced by an A.I. computer or even a non-A.I. computer, that tells you upon clocking in what route you have, what tail-up you can take, what carrier to call for help, and what time to be back by. Let carriers police themselves and make decisions about how stations should be run democratically amongst themselves.

But then, the corporate swine couldn't take over and try to make money off the USPS, which historically has had no profit motive. Someone is already making money off the Amazon deal they have, which saves Amazon's face and reputation whereas they would otherwise refuse to deliver hundreds of packages each week that they've decided are "unprofitable." Or maybe it saves Amazon a little money by getting carriers to do their extra work, as CCA's get $3 less than Amazon drivers (CCA's get $19.33/hour to start - that's less than the guy who works at Panda Express!). Someone is making a bunch of money from packages delivered by the USPS for other corporations and it ain't the carriers.

The bottom line is the entire economy still runs on the USPS. Bills, voting ballots, legal documents, medications for the elderly, not to mention cheaper prices on package shipping that help countless small businesses. You can't replace carriers with robots, and it's getting harder and harder to find people willing to work hard enough to do the job, which is much more involved than what anyone from Fed Ex, UPS or Amazon does in a day. You spend hours standing and sorting in the beginning of the day, then do what they do while keeping dps and flats constantly in your mind.

We do all this while trying not to die in outdated vehicles that constantly break down, navigating through mountains, steep driveways, and gravel roads with construction and debris from Helene still all around us. And part of why we are writing this to you is to draw attention to the immediate ticking time bomb that is the LLV. Someone in the Asheville postal service is going to die if nothing is done. 

Early on we had an LLV with a speedometer spinning wildly, Check Engine light constantly on and an extremely loud metal grating sound happening. We felt unsafe, brought the LLV to the mechanic, and he found a cracked engine bracket that was about to break. He shouted profanities at how bad it had gotten without being caught, saying it would've taken out my steering. On a fast highway this could mean running into a concrete wall and dying.

Another mechanic was just finishing working on another LLV that had the same problem and seemingly took a long time to fix. That was also on a day in January where the LLV was so packed to the brim with packages that you could barely close the backdoor, and they had to back it up to the backdoor of another LLV that had just finished fixing so I could transfer each package over to that truck. Not one word was said from a supervisor about me potentially saving my own or someone else's life by catching this other than a text that read, "I'm glad we caught that." We found out later, the regular carrier whose vehicle it was had been in a minor accident during the snow days in January and ignored doing anything about it.

We even had one of the two-wheel drive Mercedes Metris vans - that they should at least replace all the LLV's with - slide backward down some ice and we were lucky to maneuver it just out of reach of the mirrors of parked cars that surely would've guaranteed our termination early on. That was on a snow day when 27 carriers called out, leaving the CCA's to figure it out. Meanwhile, not a van from another delivery company was in sight because they don't live by that old postal creed about the weather.

We also had an LLV stall on an uphill and start sliding backwards where we had to stop it with the E-brake and was lucky it started again and I got up the rest of the hill as a truck at the top waited for us, wondering what was wrong. Every day there are sketchy turnarounds that you barely make happen, or moments where one false move and you're over the side of the asphalt and stuck where you would have to call a supervisor for a tow truck and probably lose your job. But you spend 90 days avoiding any mistakes to get a step closer to employment stability.

You also feel like you're "smoking" the LLV all day, which is essentially an enclosed golf cart that can reach 55 mph if you're lucky. You can smell the fumes of the engine you're breathing in all day and others can smell them on you when you get home later. One customer asked me to move the truck away from her house when I was sitting idly for a few minutes trying to take a few-minute break and rearrange everything in the truck because it's so bad.

It was some corporate swine's brilliant idea to tell the last manufacturer left for the LLV's parts - some company in China - that we no longer need them as we will be replacing the vehicles with electric ones. This makes no sense, because even if we get the Duckbilled Platypus's (as they were jokingly called due to their strange shape), they will most likely receive maybe around ten or so, and not enough to replace the LLV's currently needed to make the mail system work in Asheville.

We wonder if management didn't like all these vehicle repair tags we were writing up, which the teachers are so adamant about you doing in training.

On the Saturday they said I had to prove myself, the Check Engine light came on right when we got on the highway to go home and the slight rattle that had been there all day got notably louder, reminding me of the time we had caught the engine bracket just when it was about to break.

"If it breaks, they'll just write it off on their taxes," said one carrier as we handed in our repair tag with no supervisor around. Two days later we would be sent back out in that same LLV, the repair tag never processed, and no repairs made.

Do they want the LLV's to break down to save money on new vehicles at the expense of worker safety? How could Asheville, a city that is so expensive, with so many rich people, many of whom we delivered to, not muster up enough cash to at least replace these LLV's with the Metris for now?

We're writing you this to bring light to this deadly problem in that hope that it saves at least one person's life. The carriers talk about routes or sections of routes they call "The Widowmaker," and share stories of carriers who have died. The LLV's also have no air conditioning and a woman died from heat stroke in the back of one in the Asheville area last year. 

Two days after we were fired, the news broke on the mainstream media that the Postal Service plans on letting 10,000 workers go in April with an early retirement offer. The only thing that makes sense as to our firing, is that a directive was given to get rid of X amount of CCA's while you still can to offset those amongst the 10,000 who will refuse the early retirement offer.

This story will be part of a book that shares how we have now seen and faced the growing tide of fascism in this country, firsthand.

We have had fascism in this country for a long time - where corporations control your government - but it has been a clandestine dictatorship that leads all the way up to the intelligence agencies who are the brains of the U.S. military industrial complex and the murderous hand of those who own the entire monetary system. These agencies have been fighting a psy-war for your mind to keep their immoral power going using nothing but lies and fear via the mainstream and even social media. More and more Americans are seeing through it.

They want to make the postal service a corporation and profit from it, which is a metaphor for our government as a whole.

So goes the postal service, so goes America.

A lot of federal workers have just lost their jobs or are about to. We call upon those who were lied to and cheated to rise up and take their country back, and take the jobs of those who have been building fascism in this country behind the scenes for decades. There is no point in participating in the American workforce anymore when we are in a Constitutional crisis and your government is clearly being taken over by fascism.

We must dedicate our lives to fixing this crumbling system and idiocracy or die trying. We will have more on what steps to take next, but for now we share our story and pray for all those who have lost their jobs unfairly due to this fascism, so that they might find the strength to not only go on but the courage to do something about it.

No one should have to experience what we are now. The intelligence agencies are using the "worst boss in the world" puppet at the top, with a backstory of legal immunity to everything, as a way to get others in power to be emboldened toward immorality and to poke and prod at what they can now get away with - the acquiescence toward which leads to fascism.

Our termination letter read March 11, the birthday of our father. He was a letter carrier. He earned his retirement after some 30 odd years. We always put off the USPS as an employment option because we wanted to go beyond what he had done. But we gained a newfound respect for the job he did every week and gave it everything we had. It used to be one of the most respected jobs in America. Some say it's the best job you can get with a high school level of education. Today, by uniting against the fascism looking to divide it and our country even further, its workers can become the army that galvanizes the entire American working class into taking back our nation from the corporate cancer culture that has long since controlled it.

We Are One.

-Army of Love

As we look into how to create a non-profit so that tax-deductible donations may be accepted, please consider donating to us through our Venmo account (@armyoflove) shown below during this trying time. We are looking to simply earn enough donations for our living expenses to buy the time needed to write this book, and others, as we move forward with our activism.

It is time for the voice of truth and Love to be heard in this country, and we encourage others to share their own truths with courage at this time. For all inquiries and correspondence, email us at our encrypted email: armyoflove@protonmail.com