It might sound strange, but I intentionally take Sundays and Tuesdays off. I was given he opportunity to change my day off to Monday at the beginning of the year. After ten years of service, I finally had the seniority to take two days off in a row. While it was tempting, I had to decline.
Monday is the busiest day of the week at the Post Office, and since I’m on salary, I get paid the same whether or not I work busy days. It might seem obvious that this would make Monday the second most desirable day off behind Saturday, and maybe it is. I still demurred for a couple of reasons. For one thing, most holidays fall on Mondays, if you think about it. Having Tuesday off guarantees me a three day holiday weekend in most cases.
Tuesdays are not a particularly busy day. The mail and packages are generally light compared to the rest of the week. The one thing that Tuesday does have, is the supermarket ads. They are printed by a company called Red Plum, so that’s what we call the newspaper circulars that go out every week. While I don’t mind delivering these to all nine hundred+ customers that I serve daily (it is in fact easier, save for a trailer park on m route), first they have to be put up in my case.
A mail sorting case is basically a desk with a wraparound bookcase that is divided up into one inch sections for every address on the route. The first mailbox is at the bottom left, continuing all the way around the case, and then continuing at the next level up, until you have progressed through all six levels, and ended at your last mailbox at the very top right side of the case. As I mentioned before, I have about nine hundred mailboxes, which means I have an extra wing on my case to accommodate them all.
Which brings us to the crux of the problem I have with Tuesdays: I have, at the very least, a torn rotator cuff in my right shoulder, and it is painful to load up that top level with a hundred and fifty newspapers. Really painful. So it easiest just to avoid Tuesdays altogether.