There’s Something Wrong with Aileen

Date: 6/24/2026

I’ve cried only a handful of times at work. Which surprises me, actually. Not because I enjoy the job. Quite the opposite. Some mornings, the mere thought of work is enough to make me want to fling myself across a chaise longue and sob into a lace handkerchief while a violinist plays somewhere in the distance. But I try not to. I try to keep it together. Keep calm. The trick, I’ve found, is keeping the waterworks firmly switched off. No matter what happens. No matter how ridiculous the day becomes. I shall not let the bastards bring me down. Or, at the very least, I shall not cry until I get home. Most of the time, this works. The first notable exception came shortly after I completed my three days of training. Three days. Apparently sufficient time to transform an ordinary woman into a fully functioning postal professional. Or at least sufficiently functional to be released into the wild unsupervised. I remember stepping out onto my round feeling absurdly confident. Easy. Walk. Post letters. Walk. Post letters. How hard could it be? Famous last words, of course. As it turned out, very. There was, however, one small flaw in my calculations. The post was multiplying. I realise how that sounds. Unlikely. Even impossible. But I can only report what I witnessed. Every time I opened the HTC trolley lid, there appeared to be more letters than before. I’d clear an entire street, feeling rather pleased with myself, only to return and discover fresh envelopes lurking in the depths like they had been breeding unsupervised. The thing seemed possessed. A cursed postal artefact whose sole purpose was the slow, methodical dismantling of my confidence and will to live. I half expected it to start laughing at me. I reached the halfway point of the round and checked the time. Half past five. Then I looked inside the trolley. Half full. My stomach dropped. My PDA was choosing that exact moment to have what can only be described as a technological nervous breakdown. Nothing scanned properly. Addresses disappeared. Deliveries refused to complete. The whole day felt as though it was quietly collapsing around me. So did I. Right there on the pavement. In public. Broad daylight. Full mental-breakdown mode. The ugly sort. The sort where you start hyperventilating and dignity scurries away, while passersby give you a wide berth, heads down, quietly pretending none of this is happening. “I can’t fucking do this,” I kept muttering. Over and over again. Like a tormented mantra. Like if I repeated it enough times the trolley might simply disappear. Eventually, through a blur of tears, panic, and increasingly inventive swearing, I called the office and admitted what was becoming painfully obvious. I wasn’t coping. Not even remotely. And then, as though heaven had heard my primal war cry and decided, with great urgency, to intervene… Sara appeared. To this day, I couldn’t tell you where she came from. One moment I was standing alone on the pavement, drowning beneath letters, parcels, and my own tears. The next, she was simply there. Like someone had opened a small administrative portal in the clouds and dispatched exactly the right angel for the job. Not one of those glamorous angels from paintings, all golden curls and celestial trumpets. This angel came with a hi-vis vest and the sacred knowledge of how many parcels can fit in a trolley, and exactly how many tears count as a genuine emotional emergency. “Come on, honey,” she said, lifting the lid. “Let’s see what we’ve got left.” And somehow, the panic immediately loosened its grip. Not completely. But enough to breathe. Together we blasted through the remaining parcels in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen. I had somehow transformed a fifteen-minute problem into a full-scale psychological event. A skill I’ve continued to refine ever since. “Don’t let the job get to you,” she said afterwards. “It’s not worth it.” I wiped my face, feeling silly, relieved, and a little mortified that several hundred pieces of paper had reduced me to tears. Then she said something I’ve never forgotten. “We deliver letters.” She shrugged. “We don’t save lives.” And for some reason those words landed exactly where they needed to. We don’t save lives. We’re not surgeons. We’re not firefighters. Nobody’s heart stops because Mrs Jenkins receives the latest issue of Fence & Hedge Quarterly a day late. It’s only post. And somehow, from that day onwards, the tears mostly stopped. Mostly. There were still occasional relapses. One involved me losing my PDA before eventually retracing my entire round and discovering I’d left it balanced neatly on top of a postbox. As one does. Another involved me losing the van keys and spending ten frantic minutes searching every conceivable location before discovering they were in my pocket all along. Crafty bastards. And then there’s Aileen. Every workplace has one. The person whose name enters a room before they do. The person who can make eye contact feel unnecessarily risky. The person everybody secretly prays they won’t get partnered with. In many ways, Aileen reminds me of the Pope Mobile. The van. The beast. The one nobody wants the keys to. Tall. Squat. Somehow judgemental. It’s like the actual popemobile got a paint job, fell on hard times, and started a second career delivering junk mail in Somerset. The Quasimodo of the fleet. The one management presents with forced enthusiasm while everyone else suddenly develops an urgent interest in literally anything else. Need somebody to clean the toilets? Reorganise the frames? Count elastic bands until retirement? Strangely, volunteers emerge from every corner in the depot. Drive the pope mobile? Silence. A silence so complete you can practically hear people avoiding eye contact. Aileen has precisely the same energy. Just fewer rattles and slightly less rust. She has her chosen people. Her favourites. Everyone else exists somewhere outside the invisible velvet rope. Sadly, I wasn’t one of them. I remember the first time management tried pairing us together. Aileen glanced over. Looked me up. Looked me down. Not with hostility. Not even curiosity. More like somebody inspecting a melon they had absolutely no intention of buying. Then she simply said: “Nope.” That was it. No explanation. No discussion. Just a flat, immediate nope. It’s remarkable how much damage a single syllable can do when delivered correctly. Now, in fairness, I was still new then. Still learning and carrying around all the emotional resilience of a damp paper towel. A strong breeze would’ve finished me off. And if I’m being completely honest, I desperately wanted people to like me. Not everybody. Just enough people to feel I belonged there. So yes. The tears arrived. Right in front of her. Which, unfortunately, only reinforced everything she already thought about me. “You’re not going to last two seconds in this place,” she sniped. “You need to grow a backbone.” At the time, it felt unbelievably cruel. The sort of comment you replay later whilst staring into space. A deeply unpleasant observation, wrapped in barbed wire, delivered by a carrier pigeon from Hell. But an observation nonetheless. Still. What a cow. Later I learned that this was simply what Aileen did. If management paired her with somebody she didn’t like, she’d make their life so miserable they practically begged to be reassigned. Aileen. Which brings me to last night’s dream. Somehow, through subconscious decisions I can only assume were made by a dream god with a dark sense of humour, I’ve been paired with her. The Death Card herself. The final boss of the depot. I arrive emotionally seatbelted and braced for impact. Preparing for criticism. Preparing for judgement. Preparing to be found lacking in some new and inventive way. Instead, Aileen smiles at me. Smiles. Not a fake smile. Not “the manager is watching” smile. A proper smile. The sort that reaches the eyes. I’m immediately suspicious. Something is wrong. Terribly wrong. I start scanning around for hidden cameras or wondering whether I’ve accidentally died in my sleep. “Aileen?” I ask cautiously. “You alright?” She laughs. Laughs. The day unfolds into increasingly impossible events. She helps load the van. Offers advice. Shows me shortcuts. At one point she asks if I’m doing alright. At another she hands me a bottle of water. “Make sure you stay hydrated.” I stare at her. The bottle feels suspicious. Like it could contain poison. Or spit. But no. Just water. Cold. Refreshing. Disturbingly considerate. By mid-morning, I’ve developed several working theories. Theory One: Aileen has suffered a head injury. Theory Two: Aileen has been abducted by aliens and has had a full personality transplant. Both seem more plausible than the reality unfolding before me. And as the day goes on, I find myself slowly lowering my guard. Because that’s the thing about kindness. It never kicks the door in. It sneaks in. Before you realise it, you’ve started believing it. By lunchtime we’re chatting. By mid-afternoon we’re laughing. And somewhere during the round I realise I’m no longer waiting for the sting, no longer expecting criticism behind every compliment, no longer bracing for impact. It’s such a strange feeling that it almost makes me sad. Because I hadn’t realised quite how tightly I’d been holding those old assumptions until I started letting them go. By the time we head back to the depot, the whole thing feels strangely lovely. Like discovering the monster under the bed wasn’t a monster at all. Just somebody sitting alone in the dark. And perhaps that’s why the dream affects me. Because somewhere between the letters, parcel, and endless walking, I start revising a story I’ve been telling myself for years. The story where Aileen is the villain and I’m the girl she dismissed before I’d even opened my mouth. And somewhere deep inside me, a small hopeful voice begins whispering that perhaps people really can change. Perhaps we’ve both changed. Perhaps we’ve simply misunderstood each other all these years. The thought follows me all the way back to the depot. The evening sun hangs low over the yard, painting everything in that soft golden light that somehow makes even industrial estates nostalgic. For a while, neither of us says very much. We simply unload the van. Letter trays. Packets. Yorks. The familiar rhythm of ending a shift. And for a while that strange feeling remains. Hope. A ridiculous thing, really. Hope. Particularly when it’s attached to Aileen. Yet there it is. Growing quietly inside my chest. Because the day has been good. Not merely survivable. Good. Aileen turns towards me. For a moment she simply looks at me. Then she smiles. A genuine smile. “Well,” she says. “Spending the day with you has changed my opinion of you.” And just like that, something loosens. A knot I didn’t even realise I was carrying. One tied years ago by a single word. Nope. Maybe this is it. Maybe people really can surprise you. Maybe — “I thought you’d grow out of it.” The smile never leaves her face. I frown. “Grow out of what?” She shrugs. “Being you.” And there it is. Two words. Being you. For a second, I genuinely feel it. That old familiar sting. The urge to defend myself. But dream-Amanda surprises me. Instead I stand there. Watching her. Half expecting her to laugh and tell me she’s joking. She doesn’t. She simply nods. Satisfied. Then turns and walks away. Just like that. No shouting. No malice. Just a few words, tossed casually over her shoulder, before disappearing across the yard. And somehow that makes them worse. I stand there watching her go, feeling something old and uncomfortable shift inside me. Not enough to cry. Just enough to sting. Because perhaps the hardest thing isn’t believing people can change. It’s realising how much you’d already started believing they had.