【英语社会】当邮差比当高管更快乐？

A postman picks up a letter from a pile, looks at the address and slowly puts it into a pigeonhole. Then he takes another and repeats the process. Nearby, a group of colleagues stand watching him. They are worried about him as they can see things aren't quite right. Later, they discover that he has been threatened by a violent thug and so pay the thug a visit and spray him with red paint. Job done, the biggest of them – fondly known as “Meatballs” – triumphantly explains the reason for his heroism: “I'm a fucking postman!”

A few days after I watched this unlikely scene from Looking for Eric, Ken Loach's new comedy, I heard the same words repeated by an acquaintance at a garden party in Oxfordshire – though this time without the expletive.

The last time I'd seen this man he was the marketing director of a business that sold organic TV dinners. But since then his company had been sold to a multinational and, after a brief spell as a consultant to the new buyer, he had been eased out altogether.

For a while he had looked for similar work but discovered that in a recession no one wants to pay an unemployed 56-year-old a six-figure salary to work in marketing. So he thought again and decided to try his hand at the job that he had wanted to do ever since he was a boy. He looked at me triumphantly. “I'm a postman,” he said.

“Blimey,” I said. “What's it like?” He said it was quite the best job he'd ever had.

And then I thought of the film, and wondered if Loach was right after all. Was there a special camaraderie among men who put letters through the holes in doors? Or was the less sentimental US view of postmen more accurate – that they are less likely to help their colleagues than to kill them? In the 1980s and 1990s there was a spate of nasty incidents in US post offices where workers went nuts and started shooting workmates – as a result of which there is the special expression “to go postal” to describe anyone who gets uncontrollably angry at work.

My acquaintance confirmed that his fellow postmen were neither terribly nice nor terribly nasty. There was no heart-warming camaraderie; instead there was a mild hostility caused by the fact that he works part time and they resent part timers. He pitches up at a relatively leisurely 7.30am to deliver the letters that full timers have already been sorting for two hours.

Morale, in any case, was quite low. The business is contracting at about 10 per cent a year. And postmen are now being forced to walk faster and deliver back-breaking quantities of junk mail.

So why was he so happy? I wondered. It could hardly be the money – his gross pay of £235 ($381, €274) a week is a 10th of what he used to make. But even that, he said, didn't bother him. His kids had left home and he had some savings from his old job. He thought it a fair rate for the job and told me that the previous week he had made some overtime and felt rich because he could buy a takeaway pizza out of the extra.

He explained that what he really liked about the job was that it was healthy. Four hours spent walking was an inherently happier way of spending one's time than four hours sitting on one's bottom. Maybe; yet to me lugging a bag up and down the stairs of dismal council flats still didn't seem like a recipe for happiness.

He said he also liked the contact with the people – when you deliver people's mail you get to know a good deal about them. But this wasn't a proper answer either. There is no time for a modern postman to do much more than say “morning!” and pass on swiftly.

But then he said something that made more sense. His new job had allowed him to reclaim his mind. When he goes home at 1pm every day he does not have to give work another thought till 7.30am the next day. In his old job, worries from the office took up permanent residence in his head, making his synapses too ragged to allow him to focus properly on anything else.

And then I started to realise why he loves this job so much. It has nothing to do with how nice it is to be a postman in absolute terms but how nice it is relative to being a senior manager. He enjoys lugging his big bag because he knows what the alternative is. He knows how wretched it is spending your working life trying to get people to do things they don't want to do and bearing responsibility for things that you can't change. The only good things about being a top manager are status and money; if you ignore those, then being a postman is a much nicer way of passing the time. At 56, he said he had got beyond status, and as he had a small pile of savings, he was ready to be a manual worker.

The Japanese know all about this. There are plenty of older people who do manual work – any work is seen as better than no work – and there is nothing especially demeaning about being downwardly mobile at the end of one's life.

This seems to me a perfectly good way of ending ones career: doing redeeming manual work almost as a hobby, subsidised by savings from fatter times. The model has one fatal flaw: the jobs are being taken away from younger people who might enjoy the work less, but who, alas, need the money more.
 

一名邮差从一堆信中拿起一封，看了看地址，慢慢将其放入一个信箱。接着又拿起另一封，重复上面的动作。不远处，站着一群同事看着他。他们有些担心，觉得事情有点儿不对劲。后来他们了解到，这名邮差受到了一名恶棍的恐吓，于是他们造访了那名恶棍，朝他身上喷红漆。搞定后，在这些被亲切地称为“蠢货”的人当中，块头最大的那一个，神气地解释了自己英雄行为的动机：“我是一名该死的邮差！”

这不可思议的一幕是肯•罗奇(Ken Loach)的喜剧新作《寻找埃里克》(Looking for Eric)中的一个场景。在看了这部电影几天后，我在牛津郡的一个花园派对上听到一位熟人重复了相同的话——不过，这一次没有那个骂人的词。

我上一次见到这个人时，他还是一家有机冷冻快餐食品销售公司的市场营销主管。但此后，这家公司就被出售给了一家跨国企业。在为新东家做了一段时间的顾问后，他还是被免了职。

有一阵子他一直想找类似的工作，但他发现，在经济衰退期间，没人想给一位56岁的失业者发放6位数年薪，做市场营销。考虑再三，他决定尝试去做一份自孩童时代起就曾梦想着的工作。他骄傲地看着我说：“我是个邮差。”

“我的天啊，”我说。“感觉如何？”他表示，这是他有生以来最棒的一份工作。

于是我就想到了那部电影，并怀疑罗奇到底对不对。那些把信塞入门缝的男人之间，真的有一种特别的同志情谊吗？美国人对于邮差不那么动情的看法——他们更有可能杀死同事，而非伸出援手——是否更准确些呢？上世纪八、九十年代，美国邮局发生了多起恶性暴力事件，邮差们失去了理智，开始朝同事们开枪——因此还诞生了一个特别的词汇“发疯”(go postal)，描述在工作时怀有无法遏止的愤怒的人。

我这位熟人证实，他的同事们既不太好，也不太差。没有什么暖人心房的同志情谊；相反，他们还对他怀有一丝敌意，因为他是兼职，而他们憎恨兼职工作者。每天早晨7点半，他才悠闲自得地开始投递信件，而这些信是那些全职工人们花了2个小时分拣出来的。

总之，士气相当低落。邮政行业每年在以10%左右的速度萎缩。如今，邮差被迫加快步伐，递送量大得能累断腰的垃圾邮件。

那么他为何还这么快乐呢？我对此很好奇。几乎不可能是因为钱——这份工作周薪为235英镑（合381美元），是他过去收入的十分之一。但他表示，即便如此，他也不介意。孩子们都已离开家，自己也从上一份工作中积攒了一些积蓄。他认为这份薪水很公平，他还告诉我，前一周他赚了一些加班费，他感到自己变得富有了，因为他能另外叫一份外卖比萨饼了。

他解释说，这份工作真正吸引自己的是它有益健康。相对于坐上4个小时，走4个小时是更让人从心底感到愉悦的打发时间的方式。或许的确如此；但对我来说，拖着个邮包在阴暗的政府福利房的楼梯上爬上爬下，似乎也不像是快乐的秘诀。

他说他还喜欢和人打交道——送信时，你会对人们有深入了解。但这个解释同样不令人信服。对于一名现代邮差来说，除了说句“早上好”，接着快速转向下一家，他也没时间再做更多别的什么事儿了。

但他接下来给出的理由就比较合情合理一些。他的新工作可以净化他的心灵。每天下午1点回到家后，直到第二天早晨7点半，他都无须再考虑任何有关工作的事情。而在上一份工作中，对工作的担忧在他脑海里挥之不去，这让他疲惫不堪，无暇再去关注其它事情。

于是，我开始理解他为何如此热爱这份工作。这与做一名邮差从绝对意义上讲是多么美妙无关，而是相对于做高管，这种工作非常美妙。他很高兴拖着大大的邮包，因为他清楚另一种选择是什么。他明白，那是多么不幸的一件事，在工作时试图让其他人做内心不喜欢的事情，还要为那些自己无法改变的事情承担责任。作为一名高管，仅唯一的好处就是身份和金钱；如果你不在乎这些，那么当一名邮差是一种好得多的打发时间的方式。他说自己56岁了，已经不再在乎地位了，而且他还有一小笔存款，他已做好了当体力工人的准备。

日本人深谙此道。该国有大量老人在做体力劳动——人们认为，无论哪种工作，都比失业强——而且，在生命接近终点时社会地位下降，也没什么特别有损身份的地方。

在我看来，这似乎是结束工作生涯的完美方式：做些补偿性的体力工作，几乎把它当作一种爱好，用早些年收入更丰厚时攒下的积蓄补贴家用。但这种模式存在一个致命缺陷：这些工作是他们从那些或许不那么喜欢这份工作、却（唉）更需要钱的中青年人手中抢过来的。

译者/陈云飞