As of: March 8, 2024, 7:00 a.m
By: Tobias Gmach
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Maja Kistner at her workplace in the driver's cab of a 12-ton truck at the letter distribution center in Schorn.
She enjoys the time alone on the street: “You have peace and quiet and are your own boss,” she says.
She often hears sentences like: “You drive that?
Respect.” © Andrea Jaksch
Maja Kistner works in a classic male job.
The 26-year-old drives the postal truck from the Schorn mail center through the region, listening to crime podcasts and sometimes wondering about unsolicited help.
Insights into her everyday working life on International Women's Day.
Schorn – Quickly reverse into the gap: When Maja Kistner parks, it happens as quickly as if her 12-ton truck were a Smart.
“I’m better at driving a truck than a car,” says the 26-year-old, laughing.
She would rather maneuver the truck than park on the side of her private car.
The former is what matters in her job.
As a professional driver for the Deutsche Post DHL Group, Kistner is beyond any doubt.
And an exotic woman: among the 113 truck drivers who work in the postal districts of Munich, Starnberg and Rosenheim, there are just two women.
Maja Kistner wears a black and yellow softshell jacket with the post horn on the back, a hoodie underneath and matching safety shoes.
Loads can always tip over or fall down.
Her workplace is on the street, but she begins and ends her working day at the postal mail distribution center in the Schorn industrial area in Starnberg.
Until mid-May: Then the sorting machines will move to the new center in Germering - and the Starnberger Brauhaus wants to realize its plans for a bottling plant at the current post office location in Schorn (we reported).
Kistner enters the huge hall through a small door.
She holds the key card up to it, a beep and the DHL employee is inside.
The young woman doesn't stay long there, where countless yellow boxes are stacked up, where a complex logistics system prepares letters and small consignments of goods for onward transport.
At the beginning of her shift week - she has eight different ones in constant rotation, three of them at night - she is only interested in one box.
Inside are: the roster, the logbook and the truck key.
Then we go back out into the yard.
Lights, tires, brakes, coolant: the daily departure check takes 15 minutes.
22 letter container trolleys fit into Kistner's 12-ton truck.
Your job is to drive these to various delivery points, from where individual households are delivered.
You have peace and quiet and are your own boss.
Maja Kistner about the beauty of her job
The Munich woman enjoys driving alone and high above the other cars in the Starnberg district and beyond.
Especially at night, when she sometimes drives longer distances, around two hours to Neu-Ulm.
She then likes to listen to music (“everything except hits”) or podcasts that tell about true crimes.
There's no reason to be scared for Kistner, she prefers to rave about the lonely journeys: "You have peace and quiet and are your own boss."
She was able to sense this feeling as a child in Karlsruhe, where she grew up.
Her father loaded containers at the Rhine port and transported them to the surrounding area by truck.
Little Maja and her brother were sometimes allowed to go along.
“I was already jealous of the other truck drivers back then,” she says today.
However, training to become a professional driver was still a long time coming - and from 2020 it would be Kistner's fourth.
She only canceled the first one.
A friend convinced her to become a teacher.
“But I wouldn't have thought that so many children in one place would be so tiring.” Luckily, a flyer from the post office soon landed in her mailbox.
She became a specialist in courier, express and postal services – “simply so that she could have something in her pocket and perhaps later be able to move up in the company”.
On top of that, Kistner completed the (shortened) training to become a freight forwarding clerk, but at some point she had to realize: “Customer acquisition is not my thing at all.” Nevertheless, she is happy that she might be able to fall back on it one day.
“If I ever have children, I could go back to the office.”
She often hears sentences like: “You drive that?
Respect."
When the young woman sits in the truck, just gets in or fills up the truck, she always gets puzzled looks - and hears sentences from strangers like: “You drive that?
Respect.” At first she found it funny, but now it’s rather tiring.
“When it comes to the mental separation of men’s and women’s jobs, we as a society still have a long way to go,” says Kistner.
She sometimes finds it a bit strange when several colleagues rush to help her while unloading.
“My male colleagues don’t get them.
I’m sorry then.”
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And then Maja Kistner tells the story of a newcomer who she was supposed to train a few years ago.
When she asked him to turn right, he turned left.
When she gave him tips on inviting people, he ignored her.
She got the impression that he simply didn't want to be told anything by a woman, especially a young one.
“Not being taken seriously is, I think, the biggest fear of women taking up so-called men’s jobs,” says the truck driver.
The incident didn't deter her at the time - but rather encouraged her.
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By the way: Everything from the region is now also available in our regular Starnberg newsletter.
You can find even more current news from the Starnberg district at Merkur.de/Starnberg.