Sometimes, all it takes is one bad decision from management to turn an already chaotic day into a full-blown disaster.

So, what would you do if your supervisor insisted you use your own phone to run deliveries, even though the whole system was a mess, and you had no way to stay safe once your battery hit zero?

Would you just go back home? Or would you muddle through the day for as long as you can?

In the following story, one mail carrier finds herself in this situation and decides to work until her phone shuts off.

Here’s what happened.

“Use your personal phone as work equipment”? Okay, but when it quits I have no other backup so don’t expect me to finish the job.

Some years ago, I did a brief stint as a mail carrier with the postal service.

Every Sunday, people were mandated to come in on rotation to do Amazon deliveries, and the rotation was usually split in two, a 1:3 ratio, with one person from the tenured carriers and three people from the contract carriers per branch, with 3-4 branches reporting to our location, as we were the sorting hub.

This particular Sunday, we had the following complications: All four people from my branch were new/contract carriers, including myself, because it was Labor Day Weekend, and the tenured folks could not be mandated in.

This was only my second Sunday delivery, and I hadn’t really been trained

She couldn’t figure out the GPS and told them to use their personal phones.

Our postmaster was subbing in at an out-of-state location, so we had someone filling in for her. The sub postmaster was out this day, so we had one of the lower supervisors filling in for him. A sub for the sub.

Our scanners weren’t working that day, which also meant the auto-generated routes weren’t populating on them (because it was Sunday, they were dynamic routes that changed every week based on what packages we had/where they were going). We had to go by printed routes (with no directions on them).

When we brought it up to the sub supervisor that the scanner GPS wasn’t working, she told us to “just use your phones.”

We were like, “What? No, absolutely not.”

After she insisted, they contacted the union rep.

It’s wrong to expect us to use our personal devices as work equipment and not get compensated for it, especially for those of us who don’t have unlimited data plans.

She insisted, so we called our union reps from our respective branches, who told us we were well within our rights to pack up and go home, but that we’d not get paid for the day, but if we stayed and couldn’t finish, we’d get paid the full day + any overtime.

Three people walked out and went home, and I don’t blame them, but it left the rest of us to pick up their slack. I stayed because I couldn’t afford to lose the pay.

I did warn this supervisor that, as a young femme-presenting person, I didn’t feel comfortable going without any sort of communication, so as soon as my phone died, I’d be coming back and going home, regardless of how many packages I still had left. She brushed me off, but off I went.

At this point, she went back to the shop.

Sure enough, my phone died around 3 pm. I messaged her when I had 1% left and told her I was on my way back; she frantically tried reaching out to me to tell me she figured out the GPS and was sending another carrier out to meet me to show me how to do it on my scanner. I ignored them.

When I returned, she tried to write me up for insubordination/refusal to deliver. I refused to sign the write-up and wrote up my own undeliverable report detailing everything that had happened, including the instructions she gave and what our union rep told us.

She refused to sign THAT in retaliation. I took her pen and wrote MANAGER REFUSED TO SIGN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT in all caps, and called the rep back right in front of her to let them know I’d be filing a grievance the next day, and went to unload my truck.

The whole thing gave her a newfound respect for mail carriers.

As I was unloading, I saw other carriers also coming back and having the same conversation with her; apparently, they’d heard me tell her in the morning what I planned to do and decided to do the same.

The sub postmaster AND the district postmaster both had to come in to finish delivering the packages. I quit not long after this, but I heard from other carriers that she was fired by the end of the year.

I now have a newfound understanding of the crap the mail carriers put up with, and have since started leaving snacks/water for my mail carriers.

Wow! Talk about an unfortunate series of events.

Let’s see how the folks over at Reddit relate to this situation.

Here’s an interesting thought.

According to this reader, they worked for USPS for a short time.

You would think!

What a messy workplace!

It’s good she quit because that place sounds like a nightmare.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.