📗 REVIEW: Mailman by Stephen Starring Grant

On the difference between work and service, or: how the US Postal Service sucks at taking care of its people.

I don’t remember where I first heard about Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home (affiliate link!), but I liked it. It was indeed a pretty wild ride, although I went in not knowing much more than the title and there ended up being more bureacuratic analysis than I was expecting. I didn’t, for example, realize that the author had a prior white collar career or that the book took place during the Covid years. If I had, I might not have read it (I don’t particularly enjoy reading complaints from strangers about those times, valid or not)… but that would have been a mistake.

I got sidetracked by life the first time I picked it up, although the story was very engaging. I didn’t have a chance to keep going, and mostly forgot about it. Then I ran across the hardcover at the library and grabbed it again. Before I could get more than a couple of pages in, it was time to visit family in Kansas City. My husband asked for a good book to read, so I grabbed it and gave it to him on the plane.

He got through about fifty pages once our daughter chilled out, and we both agree it’s well written — not always the case! It’s nonfiction but pretty funny, and I just really like the dry humor and clear passion. It also has the benefit of being a book that not very many people could have written.

To get a little more specific, Stephen Grant lost his high powered consultant job in March 2020. He was fifty, had cancer, and (thought he) needed a job to qualify for health insurance, which is how he ended up delivering the mail around his hometown of Blacksburg, Virginia. The book follows him through learning the job during the pandemic, when a surge in package deliveries made an already difficult job “Christmas levels” of harder. Having once started a retail job selling “fine jewelry” at a department store literally on Black Friday, I sympathized. But beyond that, his account of the emotional importance of finding meaningful work really resonated with me, and I found the “behind the scenes” look into how the mail works genuinely riveting.

Not least of which because L. E. Modesitt, one of my favorite authors, has blogged several times about his frustrations with the modern USPS and it’s always piqued my curiosity. He’s focused on pricing policy frustrations and things like delays involved with “priority mail,” and I suspect he would enjoy the book for the unusual perspective it offers.

The book opens with Grant driving from the right-hand seat so he can reach the mailboxes, stretching his left arm across to steer and his left leg over to work the pedals. The center console has been torn out to make room, and the power steering leaks. He’s learning to drive like this while trying to find houses along rural backroads, while Google Maps tells him where to go. Its navigation voice becomes “Google Girl,” which is probably a more accurate name than “the Lady,” which is what I call it. He follows ~her with a desperation that conveys a pretty good idea of how the job is going:

I am behind schedule and this route is almost sixty miles long, and besides, this is where Google Girl says I need to be, headed toward the destination of the next parcel, and I would follow Google Girl’s voice to the gates of hell like she was Satan’s sweetheart because all summer long I’ve either been following her, the river, or the passage of the sun across the sky because without something to follow in this time-warp wilderness I’m just lost.

He shares the experience of overwhelmed without making it a dull or depressing tale, and really rams home the idea that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. In a way I liked the book for the same reason I like articles¹ from Annie Normal; even when I don’t necessarily agree, the phrasing has that certain something that is both bitingly hilarious and just over the top enough to convey real but not always literal emotion.

A study in contrasts

Early in the pandemic, Grant picked up groceries for his parents so they could avoid risking a trip to the supermarket. While his father unloaded the car, they stood apart in the driveway and talked about Grant’s postal training. His father thought people needed to learn how to wear masks properly; Grant explained that people in his class were claiming the masks caused COVID, at which point declared that the people of Appalachia were too stupid to help.

Grant follows the story of this biting comment with an account of his father’s life in the region:

My dad was born in Weston, West Virginia. He spent every summer hunting and fishing with his grandfather and uncle and his cousins up in the Cranberry Backcountry. He could rebuild a car engine, dress a rattlesnake, can vegetables; do masonry, electrical, and carpentry work. He knew how to read the weather, every tree in the forest, could call birds and track signs, and work a pump shotgun like an extension of his body. He swam the Kanawha River, shore to shore, there and back, on a bet. He could sharpen an ax fine enough that he could shave with it. He knew all the bugs and when they hatched, he tied his own fly patterns based on a lifetime of careful observation of the natural world. He could dry-flyfish small water with wizard-like accuracy, a thing of beauty to watch; it was funny to see something so graceful from a big quiet man. He could split wood from sunup to sundown. Run a chain saw like a surgical instrument and drive a car like a NASCAR driver. He was tough, a no-quit person who seemed unaffected by heat or cold, even into his eighties. He was all of that, the genuine article, a mountain man. He just happened to have a PhD and be a college professor.

After explaining how thoroughly his father belonged to the community he was criticizing, Grant concludes that his dad gets to say this, and “Everybody else can fuck right off.”

The book offered a really interesting mix of cultures along several axes, and while he didn’t shy away from making points related to politics (he was grateful to his union, for example, and really didn’t like Postmaster DeJoy), he also did a nice job of trying to thread the politely neutral needle common to his social class’ communication style. Perhaps tellingly of my own background, I appreciated it. It’s a pretty rare thing to find a “true mountain man” from the upper middle class, and an equally rare thing to have a gifted C-suite communicator doing the fairly menial work of delivering the mail, and I really appreciated the cross-class insights.

And it’s telling that neither Grant’s raw intelligence nor his personal familiarity with the region did not entirely keep him from struggling as a beginner at delivering its mail, even in the office park where he’d worked for almost four years. Both did help, though. For example, his assigned route included Virginia Tech’s Corporate Research Center, a campus of nearly identical brick buildings with mirrored windows and hard-to-find addresses. Other substitute carriers got turned around there, but Grant rented a one-room office in the Garvin Center and knew the campus well enough that the postmaster had assigned him the route with that advantage in mind. He ended up delivering mail to his own office, which he optimistically kept.

Still, following the delivery route through those familiar buildings occasionally confused even him. He took careful notes while Cash, the route’s regular carrier, drove him through it, then went back afterward and drove it himself. He made a Google Maps route and studied the addresses he’d written on a yellow legal pad; that night, he kept waking up picturing the buildings and mailboxes. He describes it as “a familiar place that had been rendered alien by ‘mailvision’”.

It was really cool to me to see how studying and memorization really helped him out in this difficult job. That yellow legal pad didn’t make him instantly as good as the experienced colleagues, but it certainly helped keep him from washing out of the job — which was a surprisingly common occurance. Carriers have to sort mail into a “case,” which are a set of compartments arranged in route order. Headquarters determines that order through route studies, but the carrier still has to learn how to reach every address, and organize the mail to facilitate smooth delivery:

Once a route was set, an efficiency study done by Operations Research types at headquarters then created the route order, which in turn dictated the layout of the case. Each route had a big three-ring binder outlining every address and every turn of the route. This was kept at the case, and I never saw anyone use them. The only real way to learn a route was to drive it.

One of my friends worked on data science efficiency studies for mail routes, so it was especially interesting for me to read about the carrier’s side of that work. They’re provided directions, but using them well enough to finish the day’s deliveries is a lot harder than it seems.

The job is hard in other ways, too

While sorting his mail at the post office, Grant missed a yellow card marking a house as vacant. Mail for that address should have been held back, but he took it out on his route. Hot, distracted, and trying to make up time, he opened the mailbox and shoved in a handful of letters before looking inside. He felt something crunch and discovered the hard way that hornets had filled the box with a nest while ownership was in flux.

He floored the accelerator and escaped without a sting, mostly by fluke. His panic had an extra good reason, though: years earlier, he’d accidentally hit a hornets’ nest with a paintbrush while working at a Scout camp (this becomes relevant later, as he led the rebranding effort to transform the Boy Scouts of America into Scouting America). The hornets landed on his forehead and kept stinging until he ran into the lake; afterward, both eyes swelled shut and his father had to take him to the emergency room.

Unfortunately, the adult Grant was on a dead end road. After delivering to the remaining mailboxes, he had to turn around and drive back through the swarm. He closed the windows and sped through, hearing the hornets hit the windshield, but his vehicle’s weak air-conditioning couldn’t cool him down — a recurring theme throughout the book. By the time he reached the river, he was so overheated and lightheaded that he wondered whether he was having a cardiac event. He stopped and dunked his head in the water.

His fellow carrier Kat called to check on him — another recurring event, and Grant was incredibly gratified when he got experienced enough to ride to the rescue of newbies — and offered to help finish his deliveries. He told her about the hornets, the heat, how slow he was, and that he wanted to quit. It was a pretty emotional moment. She told him: “Don’t quit today.” He agreed to meet her and keep going.

Lots of that in this book, too.

Dangerous trucks and preventable accidents

The summer heat (and later, winter cold) really sparked Grant’s anger about the vehicles carriers were expected to use, and he did a pretty good job of convincing me they’re unconscionable death traps. Grant describes old postal trucks in which failing window seals allowed rainwater to leak into the fuse panel, which is, uh, bad. Big boom fire bad. The trucks, known as Long Life Vehicles or LLVs, also lacked air-conditioning, which meant carriers spent their summer workdays driving in hot metal boxes.

Despite remarkably dangerous working conditions, management insisted “all accidents are preventable.”

The official attitude toward road safety is very Lutheran: you were born a sinner, and only constant vigilance prevents further sin. If your LLV exploded into flames, that had to somehow be your fault.

Grant argued that OSHA “would have shut down any business that sent their people to work in these conditions,” yet postal workers were expected to keep driving the trucks. I got curious, so I looked into it (with the help of Grok 4.6 via Notion, in the interest of transparency), and it turns out that OSHA has tried to make USPS protect carriers from dangerous heat. This happened after the book was written, but it’s relevant so: in a 2023 decision involving four cases arising from carriers becoming ill in 2016, the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission agreed that the heat was hazardous but threw out the citations.

Basically, OSHA had to prove both that workers faced a recognized, serious hazard and that specific, practical measures could substantially reduce it. OSHA proposed more rest breaks, less exposure during hot weather, and, in some cases, air-conditioned vehicles. USPS argued that additional labor costs would threaten its finances and its ability to deliver everyone’s mail. The commission found that OSHA did not establish feasible and effective remedies; for example, it hadn’t supplied specific enough schedules or cost estimates.

As of September 2026, OSHA’s federal heat standard remains in the proposal process, while its cold-weather guidance relies on the general duty clause to address hazards such as frostbite and hypothermia. Even for imminent danger, OSHA must seek a federal court order if an employer won’t voluntarily stop or correct the dangerous work. That applies to private employers too, so Grant’s claim that another business would already have been shut down is maybe a bit too optimistic. Certainly when we called OSHA for the schools I worked at with ridiculous conditions (air conditioners installed backwards and pumping heat into the classroom where we weren’t allowed to open doors or windows springs to mind), nothing really happened. Still, I think Grant is right to be angry about how workers can face recognized, serious hazards while their employer spends years contesting what it should have to do about them.

Being a mailman is a surprisingly dangerous job! Grant says that there’s an annual on-the-job injury rate of 7.0 per 100 full-time Postal Service workers, compared with an American average of 2.8. He said postal is worse than coal mining, construction, and police work, though not as risky as logging, oil drilling, garbage collection, and roofing. I’d had no idea it was that hazardous, although now that I read the book it makes sense, particularly for the rural routes.

Incidentally, dogs apparently really do hate mailmen.

Delivering Amazon’s packages

Ironically, despite a management culture that insisted “all accidents are preventable,” they utterly failed to plan for a foreseeable Amazon package surge, and when Grant worked out a way to clear the backlog, his supervisors angrily blew him off because he was supposed to stick to carrying the mail. In fact he got in trouble for “accessing confidential information” because he… measured things in plain sight with his eyes. It was a particularly galling story, and reminded me of similar experiences in teaching public school. Higher-ups would often “solicit feedback” for what was allegedly a critical problem — and one causing everyone to be stressed out — be given a solution to the problem by someone competent but not in the upper ranks, and then fail to implement. Next year would roll around, no movement would be made on the problem, and no explanation given for why the solution they had solicited and seemed to like wasn’t implemented. But then we’d still have to spend an hour “brainstorming.”

Not that I’m bitter.

Anyway, in the arrangement Grant describes, UPS handled the larger Amazon packages in his region while USPS took smaller ones along routes its carriers already drove. UPS trucks had room and shelving for packages; postal trucks were built to maneuver through narrow streets and pull up alongside mailboxes, with little space for bulky parcels and, at his post office, often no interior shelves. Then Amazon tried to negotiate better shipping rates with UPS, UPS held firm, and Amazon shifted the larger packages to the Postal Service. The dispute had been going on for months, but when the volume hit Blacksburg in August 2020, management was caught unprepared. I don’t even remember this happening, I only recall generic “supply chain issues,” but it seems like it led to pretty hellish conditions in the mail rooms.

Boxes crowded the sorting area until carriers had to take unsorted loads to the dock or parking lot to organize them. Grant was being called in seven days a week, hauling the large parcels that regular carriers couldn’t fit alongside their mail. As August wore on, the backlog kept growing despite all that work. He overheard a distant manager berating the local supervisors on speakerphone about their delivery numbers.

By the time outside USPS specialists arrived from Pittsburgh, the crisis had been going on for over a month. They introduced dynamically generated parcel-only routes, called W-routes, and continuous shifts, addressing the same restrictions Grant had identified. He commented that at the time all he felt was relief and gratitude toward the specialists, but in retrospect, they should have predicted this and had a plan in place. And sure, by the end of September, Amazon and UPS reached a new agreement and the extra volume stopped, but I found that to be a really powerful moment: the specialists were basically hailed as heroes, but they really should not have been.

This institution treats accidents as a carrier’s failure of vigilance, but then they worked their people to the bone instead of following good advice from the floor, or, like, planning for a volume problem that was pretty well telegraphed in advance. Grant was relieved to see competent help arrive, and angry at himself for feeling grateful to the same expert class that should have prepared for the surge in the first place. There was a lot of that going around back in 2020, and I think it’s useful to really think through those mixed emotions.

Speaking of mixed emotions, Grant is a shareholder, and:

Wall Street loves Amazon. Capitalist Steve loves the growth and Consumer Steve loves the choice and convenience. Business school adjunct professor Steve loves Amazon’s business model and operational excellence. But mailman Steve fucking hates Amazon.

One of the people struggling alongside him is Glynnis, an older coworker also overwhelmed by the packages:

All mailman Steve could do was listen to Glynnis bitch, and cry, and swear and suffer, the picture of the future, an old woman buried under Amazon boxes forever.

For whatever reason, this made me think of a picture from the past, specifically the pony express. The pony express didn’t last very long and as far as I know never turned a profit, but I found myself wondering about the guys delivering purchases from old Sears catalogues (which, as it turned out, got popular way after the Pony Express went out of business because of the telegraph). But that led me down another rabbit hole, because in 1913, the post office starting allowing parcels. By 1929, Sears was mailing 7 million catalogues a year and selling four suits a minute. So what happened?

I don’t know, but I assume it was some variant of “logistics optimizations,” and I couldn’t help but think of how the original airlines were boosted along by federal air mail contracts. A remarkable number of groundbreaking American businesses have been built on the back of “sending messages and packages.”

Service & patriotism

Grant took a lot of pride in helping people get supplies during the pandemic. He describes how a customer’s order passes through warehouses and trucks before reaching the people sorting packages at his post office, and he is glad that system existed when people needed to stay home. He also describes carrying repeated deliveries of flavored water in flats weighing nearly twenty pounds each, and wonders whether customers could have forgone their preferred drinks or collected them curbside. The convenience of ordering a favorite drink meant someone else had to lift and carry it, and the nature of the post office is such that they are required to deliver everything that fits within its guidelines, even if it’s a much more difficult task than the price tag justifies.

Doing that work changed his understanding of serving his country. He had associated service with military life: as a young man he saluted the flag at Boy Scout camp and joined Army ROTC. He left after a girlfriend persuaded him that military life wasn’t suitable for him because his persona as a writer didn’t fit her vision of what soldiers were like, and decades later he still regretted that choice.

Delivering mail gave him another way to serve, as opposed to merely being useful. Learning the history of the Post Office helped him feel part of an institution that connects people across the country, and his daily work gave that idea a practical meaning. His neighbors were waiting for deliveries, and getting those deliveries to them was his somewhat sacred, oath-backed responsibility:

I think the distinction between white-collar work and blue-collar work is a false one. Both forms of labor want all of your time and both exact a toll. One form is no more or less noble than the other. The real distinction is between work and service, and I think it’s one of the great dividing lines in American life. I wonder if part of how we’ve become so atomized is that while we all work, few of us serve.

He imagined a program that would let people in their late forties and early fifties spend a year or two serving their communities, something like a middle-aged version of the national service program AmeriCorps. He thought the experience might make the country more unified and civil, because the responsibility of doing work for his neighbors gave him a sense of belonging that he’d missed for years. It’s a nice idea; certainly I’ve heard that a lot of retired dudes struggle to find meaningful community connections, and a resurgance or update of groups like the Lions Club and Knights of Columbus could benefit people in a similar way. There’s an older guy at my church who spends his days volunteering to help his grandsons’ schools, and it seems to give him a deep seated satisfaction and sense of community.

Scouting offers something similar, which I suspect is why Grant was drawn to helping that organization once his white collar work started to pick back up when the post-Covid economy stabilized, as well.

What it was all for

Early in the book, Grant expressed deep allegiance to his union because he credited it for the health insurance that he needed to help treat his cancer. That belief was the whole reason he took this (fairly awful, especially compared to his previous work) job. Then, near the end of the book, when he finally had an an office job lined up, he went looking for a way to take two weeks off before it kicked off. He had spent a year stuffing Medicaid flyers into mailboxes, so he checked the website to see whether he qualified, and even at his carrier income he did:

Jesus, I had qualified all along. The story I had told myself, that I needed this job for the health care, the story that led to me delivering the mail for a year, it wasn’t true.

He could have applied of government subsidized healthcare the week he lost the consulting job and skipped the hornets, the heat, the cold, the Amazon boxes, and all the rest. He said that the “old Grant” would have been angry at himself for putting himself through hell for “no reason,” but instead, he credits the experience with helping him reconnect with God and meaning, and helping him be a better person.

It reminded me of an old (2004, oi!) Rascal Flatts song: Bless the Broken Road. If you decide not to read the book — and you should — at least take a moment and listen to the song. It’s not the same type of relationship, but it just might leave you in a similar mood.

1. As it happens, I totally agree with her recent review of 2010s TV, particularly the part about The Walking Dead. I really ought to pick up the graphic novel at some point…