By Jennifer Sawhney

The first thing I want to know is, what led you to the post office?

I have a passion for cooking. I love to cook and I get it from my uncles, my mother, my grandmothers – everybody. Actually, I'm a fat boy. I love to eat. I feel like food makes everybody happy.

I graduated high school, and because my birthday falls in August, I was still 17. My goal was to go to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, but I needed a co-signer. My dad wouldn't co-sign for me. He said, ‘You can cook all you want as a hobby, but my son is not going to be in the kitchen for a full-time job. But what I will pay for is this Y2K stuff that's coming up.’ 

So it’s the Y2K era, the whole ‘it’s 1999 and everything's going to go to disaster.’ I ended up going to the Computer Learning Center in San Francisco and did an associate's degree program. That landed me a job at Children’s Hospital Oakland . I was a network administrator over there from 1998 to 2004. So, basically I was in IT (information technology).

I had my daughter in 2001 and I missed out on a lot of her childhood. Going to school, always testing, always certifying, traveling to different projects. I missed out on her first four or five years. I would come home late at 11:30 p.m., midnight, and she's already in bed. Both my parents retired from the post office and they said, ‘Why don't you go to the post office and try to get into IT?’ So that's what I did. 

I quit my job at Children's Hospital and I got into the post office thinking I would get an IT transfer right away, but found out that the new job was super, super chill. Laid back. They make tons of money and no one ever retires. There was a position opening for the window service – customers, people. 

I fell in love with it and I felt like I found my niche to be able to help people – not just with the post office – but just daily life, because you get different personalities every day. I get probably five to ten irate customers daily. ‘Why is my check not here? My social security check.’ ’Why is my package not here?’ ‘I'm homeless and I need these things. You promised this two to three days priority and I’m freezing to death.’ 

You gotta try to figure out a way to make this positive. My whole objective in life is to make everybody comfortable. My goal is to pay it forward and provide smiles. We want that setting, you know what I mean? Twenty one years later, I'm still there because I love doing what I'm doing. I told myself, forget IT. I'm not going to do it anymore. Let me just do what I feel like is fun to me.

How do you remember customers' names? 

Working in retail it’s not difficult. One, you have to love people. All the other stuff will come into play: selling stamps, selling money orders, sending down packages. That's the natural routine. It’s repetition.

There's the behind the scenes: ordering stamps, returning mail to the correct sender, forwarding the mail to people who move to different places. All the mail that's received that doesn't belong here, we got to send them back to the businesses. Handling IRS documents, DMV, the big federal agencies. There's packages and letters that come in that don't have the appropriate stamps on them, so we got to charge invoices to the customers. That’s a 24/7 ordeal. 

You know, if you can master the customer service aspect, you're good. As you continue to work there you kind of get that ‘All right, I've capped out here, the learning curve has stopped.’ 

So what I told myself was, ‘All right, let's do this mind game thing here. Let's start memorizing everybody's last name that has a post office box here.’ We'd sit there, ‘All right, who's 944? Oh, that's Mr. Young.’ So my goal is to first get their last name down because I see him and his wife frequently. I know their first names.

We try to take the business, the name, the face, and that way we can greet them. It's a brain teaser so we can keep exercising our mind, right? Because we know about dementia, we know about Alzheimer's at the end. That’s it. It's to memorize, it's the brain teasers to keep sharp and to get that personal touch, too. 

What’s your life like outside the post office? 

The same. It's being a sponge and just soaking up every ounce of it. If you're able to do it, keep making memories, right? My memories are at work. It starts off at work and that builds up for the evening. Granted, I hang out more often than anybody else because I don’t feel like I have any more responsibilities. My daughter's 25. My phone's open. If there's an issue, she's going to call me. We call each other, text each other all day.

Most of us that work Monday to Friday, sometimes I want to break up the week by hanging out whether its going out to eat, meeting with friends. Karaoke or trivia night. It breaks up the work week. I feel like that's less stress, but the objective is the same. I’m the same person no matter what. 

What’s one time you remember thinking to yourself, ‘I want to learn how to do this’?

That one’s easy. I remember my grandmother was cooking for a birthday party. And she made like eight, nine different dishes and I stayed and just watched my grandmother do it from start to finish. I was asking questions. ‘Why do you put this there?’ ‘Why do you use this type of seasoning?’ When we get to the party she sets everything up as if she were catering it. 

And she serves everybody and everybody's complimenting her on the food. Like, ‘Oh my God, this is so good.’ ‘How do you make it?’ And her response was, ‘I'll show you.’ It was like, ‘I'm not going to charge you to give you the recipes.’ It's not a sacred recipe. It was her way of paying it forward. And I just saw the joy in people. That's my grandma. I was probably like 11, barely climbed my first coconut tree.

My grandmother used to have a bakery on 24th and Mission (in San Francisco). It was a half Chinese bakery, half Filipino eatery.

And then my uncle, my dad's cousin, he started off with me making one dish and it was stuffed mushrooms. Standard button mushrooms, bacon, mayonnaise, and cheese. That was it. He was like, ‘I want you to master these mushrooms and then we'll go on to the next thing.’ So honestly, other than my grandmother, it was the stuffed mushrooms.

What's something that people don't know about you that maybe they should know? 

I got a bucket list that I want to achieve, but I'm afraid to take that leap. I'm kind of scared to make it happen because I got so comfortable with work. I love my job. And to do something else, it's difficult. I feel like I can give the best advice to everybody, but I won't take my own advice.

I want to have a bakery where all we focus on is croissants and donuts. I want to have that perfect setting, like fast turnover, in-and-out. It's either with cheese or without cheese. The only drink you can get is water and my favorite drink, sugar water, which is my version of Kool-Aid. A simplified menu. I love to cook. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Jennifer Sawhney is a reporter and co-founder of Petaluma Voice. She can be reached at jsawhney@petalumavoice.org.