Published: 10 Jan 2026.
by Gerry Gaffney
I was going through a hard time.
Okay, I know that's not a great excuse, lots of people go through hard times without making a mess of everything around them.
But anyway, I was. Going through a hard time.
I'd lost my girlfriend. Well, not lost. I mean, I knew where she was, but she wasn't my girlfriend anymore. And that made me feel pretty upset. Very upset in fact. When Eleni dumped me I shouldn't have been surprised because she'd been complaining for ages, but I was. She said that I had no ambition and that I had a dead-end job and that I didn't like to do things like shopping for household goods or going on boring beach holidays or things like that.
It's true my job could be considered by some people to be a dead-end one. But in fact there is a career structure and in time I could have worked my way up if you use "up" in the traditional sense of making more money and managing more people (more than zero) and doing policy stuff. But I was quite content with my work. It was simple, there was enough of it to keep me busy but not too busy, and it was kind of important. Although not very important as I've since found out.
I looked after the letters and parcels that couldn't be delivered.
You'd be surprised how many reasons there are why things can't be delivered. One reason is that somebody didn't pay the correct postage. Let's say I send you a letter and I'm supposed to put a 50 cent stamp on it but I only put on a 10 cent one because that's all I've got or I make a mistake or I'm just trying to pull a fast one. Then the Company puts a sticker on it saying that the receiver has to pay the shortfall - that would be 40 cent in the example I've just given - plus a fee for handling purposes, which is usually €5. So the mail delivery person goes to the addressee - that's what we call the person who's supposed to receive it - and says we need €5.40 before you can have a letter or package that I have here in my bag but can't show you. I can't even show you the envelope or box that it's in because that would transmit some information free of charge, like you might recognise the handwriting or the colour of the paper or even the perfume or in any case some information that might disincline you to pay the shortfall, so I have to keep it hidden here in my bag until you pay me the €5.40 you owe the Company.
And the person, the addressee, might say unless I can at least see the item I'm not paying. And then the mail delivery person will say okay, forget it, we'll just mark it "return to sender." Or they might relent and say okay, look at it, but that would not be adhering to Company policy so officially that does not happen. And at the end of their run or shift or whatever they call it the mail delivery person will take the letter back to the Company office and a clerk there will stamp it with their "RTS" stamp - "RTS" meaning "return to sender." And the clerk might scrawl a reason like "insufficient postage paid" or they might not, depending on how busy they are and their attitude towards their work in general or this one item in particular.
Another reason why something can't be delivered is that an address might not exist. For example, the street where I live only has odd-numbered houses because there are only houses on one side and in Aigio by long-standing tradition odds and evens are on opposite sides of the street. I live at number 33, and if a letter is addressed to number 32, it can't be delivered because there is no 32. If the mail delivery person is lazy or slipshod, and some of them are, they might deliver to number 31 or 33 and what happens then is anyone's guess. Well, if it's delivered to 33 we know what will happen because that's where I live and I'll write "RTS - no such address" and drop it in a mail box. But if it goes to 31 all bets are off. The people at number 31 are conspiracy nuts so they might think that the envelope is some sort of Trojan horse or a surveillance device or something and God knows what they would do with it.
Another reason why something can't be delivered is the addressee might be dead (we don't say dead, we say deceased which supposedly sounds nicer) or they might have moved to a different address.
Another reason is that a letter or package might be destroyed by the sorting machines. It happens, not very often but sometimes something will be just shredded or torn up or eaten by a conveyor belt or a reader machine. In that instance we're supposed to try to retrieve and repair it but honestly that's often a lost cause and the best thing to do is sweep it under the carpet. Not literally, we don't have a carpet for sweeping things under but we do have a shredder which is the same thing really.
There are other reasons but you get the general idea.
If the item is marked "return to sender" and if the sender's address is on the item, then the item is sent back to that person.
And what happens to the items that do not have an identifiable sender. Well, if they're not shredded or "lost" then they become my responsibility. At least, they used to be.
The Returns office was my little domain. Eleni visited once and ever after when she was feeling critical she'd talk about me "hiding in your little dead letter office" which was unkind and also inaccurate. Firstly because I wasn't hiding and secondly because we didn't call it the dead letter office and if we had we'd probably have called it the deceased letter office because that sounds nicer.
The Returns office is a small standalone building about 2km from the main office. Nothing went on there except the handling of "return to sender" items.
I was in charge of checking every returned item and determining its fate. At certain times of the year it got busy enough that I'd need to get a second person to help, but really it was hard to know whether it was worth the effort of training them up before it was time for them to move on.
I won't tell you all the steps I needed to take to make a determination, but there were lots. One power I had was the ability to open items when making my determination. This was a great power since it's very clearly against the law to interfere with the postal service. But I was allowed to open the items, provided I was sure that it was strictly necessary. For example, people often write their return address at the top of a letter, so by opening it up I could find the name and address of the sender and have the letter returned to them. Or it might be apparent that it was some sort of scam letter and I could then discard it - put it in the Discard pile I kept in a corner and sent for shredding at the end of each month.
I don't know if you know this, but in the Company more and more workers are being replaced by machines. We have artificial intelligence things that can read addresses, even badly written ones, and quickly sort items. So we don't need people to do those things any more. But because I had to deal with unique items they hadn't been able to train an AI to replace me.
Eleni said it showed how low my ambition was if it consisted of not being easy to replace by a machine. But if you ask me that's quite an achievement these days. I wonder how long her job will last. Being a dental assistant is mostly about passing instruments to the dentist and sticking suction tubes in people's mouths - pretty basic stuff I think you will agree and definitely not rocket science.
When Eleni dumped me my work performance started to slip, and I admit I got shoddy. Also, I'd started to drink fairly heavily and to smoke a lot of weed. I rarely had to interact with other people so I was able to keep all this secret from the Company. Otherwise they would have put me through some sort of woo-woo therapy counselling and if I didn't improve they'd have fired me. Except the wouldn't call it "firing", they'd call it "managing out." I would have been managed out.
Anyway, I was getting careless about the returned items. I really just didn't care, and I started to put more and more stuff on the "Discard" pile. At first I expected some sort of response to this. Maybe someone at Head Office would notice less "return-to-sender" traffic, or there would be complaints. But nothing happened, and the more that nothing happened the more I was inclined to put things on the "Discard" pile. Eventually I gave up completely and put every single item on that pile.
That grew pretty quickly and within a few months my little office was filling up with unattended-to items.
Only one person knew about the state of the "Discard" pile, and that was my colleague Phil. Phil is a very cool person. Part of his job was to visit my office three times a week to drop off new material and pick up whatever was ready to be returned to sender per my investigations and determinations. Every few months he would pick up everything in the "Discard" pile and take it for destruction. Mostly shredding.
One thing I always envied and admired about Phil was that he really did not care about pretty much anything, and certainly nothing to do with work. He might have been surprised when he realised there were not going to be any more "return-to-sender" items, but he never pushed it and never tried to convince me to do anything. Instead, he'd come around on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday as usual and we would sit around for an hour or more smoking weed. Then he'd get up and leave, empty-handed, to whatever else his job entailed. I never asked and he never said.
This went on for some time. I was still upset about Eleni and had only Phil's visits to look forward to and to cheer me up. When Phil wasn't there I smoked weed on his behalf and I guess I was falling apart a little.
One day, a Wednesday, Phil had to push open the door against the mass of accrued material in the "Discard" pile.
"We'll have to do something about this," he said.
I liked the way he said "we," taking ownership of the issue and not just leaving it all up to me. That's not a very common trait, in my experience, certainly not in the Company.
"What?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said.
We smoked some weed to think about it.
"We could have a fire," he said.
I thought this was an excellent idea. Part of the attraction was that it was almost a zero-effort solution. Everything was at hand - plenty of flammable material and matches.
I was about to start the fire when Phil stopped me.
"You have to open some windows," he said. "Fire needs three things - fuel, a source of ignition and oxygen. If you leave the windows shut the fire might go out from lack of oxygen.
How did he know all this, I asked.
"I'm a volunteer firefighter," he told me.
"Will you put the fire out if I light it?"
"No."
I half-opened a few windows.
"Is that enough?"
"Yeah, I think so."
Lighting the fire was easy. As soon as it was properly underway, Phil and I went to the cafe across the road. It was a nice clear spring day, so we sat at a table outside and ordered two Alfa beers.
We sat quietly and watched as the fire took hold.
The smoke was multi-coloured, blues and reds and yellows mostly.
I thought about everything that was burning. Love letters. Letters of demand. Postcards. Death notices. Reimbursements. Greetings from long-lost friends. Appeals. Scams. DNA test results. ATM cards. Bills, invoices, statements and receipts. All the useless flotsam of our times.
We sipped our beers and watched it burn.
I don't know what Phil was thinking, but I had a feeling of peace and contentment that I hadn't felt in a long time.
Eleni always said I'd never set the world on fire, but at that moment I felt I'd done my bit.
Copyright © Gerry Gaffney 2026