My kids enjoy playing a game called Harvest Moon.

It’s a game, from the little I’ve seen of it, where you set up a community and plant your crops and enjoy life in a rural setting.

It’s a pretty nice game…very peaceful.

The other day my daughter told me that when it rains in the game….when it really pours in the game…all the characters move to shelter.

No one goes outside to work or play in the downpour.

The only character who goes outside to do anything in the heavy rain is…

the mailman.

The mailman.  That’s me.

I wouldn’t even be able to catch a break in a video game.

What the heck?!  That’s kind of disappointing.

It is pouring here right now as I type this.  Soon, I’ll be out on the road, trying to keep the mail from getting completely waterlogged as it makes the short journey from my Jeep to the mailbox.

You wouldn’t think mail could get so wet traveling a couple of feet.

That’s what I do, though.  I work in all kinds of weather.

The old adage about “rain or sleet or..” ( I think there’s another part but I don’t really remember it…was it scorpions?)…that old adage wasn’t even coined by the USPS.

It’s not the official motto of the USPS.  We don’t even have an official motto.

Somebody else set us up for that long before email was invented.

I guess the saying is, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

That’s me in a nutshell…unless the “gloom of night” part threatened to put me into overtime…then they’d shut that down pretty quickly.

If it wasn’t a “money thing”, they’d keep me out all night if it suited their needs.

That’s just a feeling I have.  It may not be true.

Here’s a Wikipedia link about the saying…kind of interesting to read about it.

When you really get down to it, the weather was never a thing that risked shutting the post office down.

We can deal with something that’s a force of nature.

Now, the fact that we have to pre fund our retiree health benefits to the tune of billions of mandated dollars a year (5.5 billion dollars a year is the figure I could find) is a different issue. It’s a little harder to handle than a vicious downpour or a blizzard.

5.5 billion dollars is a big chunk out of a company’s potential profits.

When you are required by law to do that…no matter how a business is doing…it can make a bad situation look even more dismal.

We may go to a 5 day delivery schedule.  That would save about 2 billion a year, apparently.

I’d love a Saturday off every week.  I’d love that.

I would not know what to do with a normal weekend.

But, that’s 2 billion dollars out of a reported loss of 20 billion a year.

That’s not a big percentage.

I wonder what it would have been like to be a mailman when we were perceived as “weather warriors” who were unstoppable in the face of violent weather?

That’s a lot more appealing than the perception of us being overpaid Union tools working for a company in dire financial trouble.

It’s better than the misconception that “the USPS is wasting our taxpayer dollars”.

I’m going to go saddle up my horse, get my leather pack bags, and set off in the blizzard to find out.

Right now.  I gots to know.

Right.

I’ll be all right as long as I can spur that horse on to avoiding overtime.