The story of a lifetime continues. Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, part 1.

1985-1986–Safety Specialist, USPS–Fort Smith, AR

Bobbie McLane was the Human Resources Director, my first boss as a member of management, and a great mentor. I needed that, because I was pretty much clueless.

How clueless? This clueless: After I had applied for the safety job but before I was interviewed, there was a labor-management meeting scheduled up in Fayetteville. Bobbie came down to my work station and asked if I’d like to ride to the meeting with her. I politely declined. I mean, after all, I was the union steward; I didn’t want it to appear I was cavorting with management! A bit later, Bobbie’s secretary came to see me and asked me “John, don’t you want the safety job?” I told her of course I did. She gave me a look that said “are you really that stupid?” but the words she used were “Bobbie wanted you to ride with her so she could get to know you better and talk about the job”. Oh shit! Well, I made sure I was seated with Bobbie for lunch and a few days later it was announced that I had been selected as the Fort Smith, Arkansas Management Sectional Center (MSC) Safety Specialist.

I was actually quite surprised to have been picked because I had absolutely zero background or training in safety. I had met with Bobbie numerous times in my union capacity and she told me she picked me for the safety job because she liked the way I handled myself in those meetings. I guess that just goes to prove that sometimes it’s not what you know, but who you know. And that’s not always a bad thing.

So that first year I spent several weeks at the Postal Service training facility in Potomac, MD learning how to do my job. Most of the courses were two or three weeks in duration, which gave me a good opportunity to explore DC on weekends, a city I had never previously visited. I wound up doing quite a bit of traveling, and I came to enjoy meeting women the perks associated with traveling on the government dime. I’m just now recalling a wild time an important meeting in Chicago. And in kind of a weird turn of events, I was attending an accident investigation course in Norman, Oklahoma on the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded.

One of the nice things about working in a small MSC (consisting of around 100 post offices in Northwest Arkansas) was that I was given the opportunity to take on additional duties and fill various voids that were not staffed. For example, I was designated as the MSC Public Affairs Officer, where I answered media inquires and dealt with disgruntled customers. It was pretty cool to come home from work one day and have my kids excitedly tell me “daddy, we saw you on TV today!”.

Bobbie started having me write her grievance decisions as well and once she was satisfied that I was firmly in management’s camp I became her designee for dealing with the union. It was strange at first to be arguing over labor disputes from a management perspective, but I reasoned it was really just about interpreting the words in the collective bargaining agreement.

Labor relations work was what I liked best so I started applying for labor vacancies all over the country. I got interviewed for a job in Charleston, SC and selected for one in Columbia, SC. So I loaded up my family (had a new wife now) and made the move. I felt bad about leaving Bobbie in the lurch after all that training and only 18 months or so on the job. But as a good HR manager should be, she was happy to see me progress in my career and was glad that she had given me the opportunity to learn and grow.