Pros
It's cool walking around with big boy pants on throwing your weight around cops and state troopers, who won't mess with you while you're in a postal truck. It's usually because they're too lazy to fill out the paperwork for routine rule-breaking.
Cons
All mail carriers (walking or driving) eventually memorize their entire route that vary from between 300 to over 1,000 boxes. "Regulars" work on a single route and nothing else. Eventually they will memorize all street names, box numbers, residents, what the box and house looks like, and will have perfected their system so they can finish early afternoon. RCAs fill in the gaps (days off/vacation/sick leave). Simple enough... Life for RCAs REALLY sucks in several places: 1. The "classic" mail truck is old and obsolete. They lack A/C. They don't have insulation between the engine and the interior. The cabin is 10-15 F deg hotter than outside. So on the hottest days of the year at 90 deg, it will feel like 100+ in the truck. The trucks get a lot of abuse. Everyone accelerates and brakes hard. Their transmissions are often messed up and rev high. Brakes squeal. Tires are replaced several times a year. Gas mileage is so bad you have refill the tanks every 2-3 days. The newer trucks are okay and make delivering mail tolerable (they're Mercedes, have A/C, and bluetoothed stereos). 2. The time spent in the office sucks. Carriers do their jobs in two main stages. The first is spent in the office to organize the mail. Things like letters are handled using big machines that organize them by the way you'll travel through your route. Things that were out of place or other types of mail that don't go through those machines well, like newspapers or flimsy advertisements) need a person to sort them using a big cabinet that has a slot for every mailbox. The biggest problem with that is that the "regular" carriers have memorized every address. You on the other hand will work on their route knowing nothing. The cabinet is not designed for the new person. The slots are not labeled for you to easily find something. You may spend 2-3 minutes looking for a single address and you'll have over 2,000 pieces of mail to get through. The more experienced people are hostile to helping newer people organize things so they can easily find things. 3. There's a strong "pay your dues" culture. The thinking is that life sucked for them when they started and they expect new people to put up with the same. Innovations and basic common sense are dismissed. 4. Management operates as if we're still in the last century. They don't seem to realize that we're at full employment and that baby boomers are retiring, so they need to do a better job working with the new people they got. Instead they see them as disposable. 5. Work-life balance REALLY sucks. New people trying to learn their route because inventions such as LABELS or INDEXES are too radical. It's common that new people will work 10-12 hours a day... every day... for months. The "regular" work week is 6 days and you're "lucky" if you get an extra day off once every few weeks. You can't just ask for less hours. You're legally required to complete all deliveries or possibly face criminal charges if you don't. 6. Mail delivery is extremely dirty. Trucks are filthy and are rarely cleaned or swept. If you don't wear gloves, your hands will become caked in dirt. 7. Turnover among RCAs is EXTREMELY high. Your more experienced peers don't care about you and management uses underhanded methods to cheat you out of getting paid. You have to CYA and push through the BS, and many just don't want to.