Will CCAs Stand the Test of Time?

By Mel Carriere

I have now made my peace and personally reconciled with every CCA throughout the country and with the overall concept of CCAs in general.  Perhaps I was critical of the CCA idea at first because my livelihood partly depends upon overtime, and CCAs were basically invented to eliminate pricey regular carrier overtime and to reduce me to abject poverty.  But the overtime didn't go away as promised and still remains in force, albeit severely diminished after, what is it, a year and a half since the conception of the CCA?  So the CCAs and I have had our kiss and make up moment (off the clock, of course, no fraternizing on the job), and I now lovingly embrace them into the Postal fold.  Furthermore, I have trained at least a couple dozen CCAs since this grand experiment began and the majority of them have indeed stood the test of time.  I consider my trainee CCAs in particular to be like my children, and I experience a proprietary sense of pride whenever I see them pass through the Post Office where I work.

But an online thread I was following about the reliability of CCA delivery has made me wonder whether or not the CCA will stand the test of time or whether it will fade away into Postal History, along with the now defunct Casual, PTF, and TE.  First of all, I don't think that all mail delivery done by CCAs is unreliable.  I think we can divide CCAs into two categories; those senior CCAs who are pretty much permanent fixtures at the offices where they are assigned, and a much broader category that I call the "Have Satchel will Travel" variety of CCA.  This group consists of those CCAs at the bottom of the CCA food chain, who basically live life waiting patiently by the telephone to see which office among a dozen or so in the Postal CCA lottery will be their temporary home on any given day.  Their satchels, not having a permanent resting place; a little satchel hook they can call their own, remain in the trunk of the car along with a Postal pith helmet and whatever other accessories are necessary for the frenzied CCA existence, like band-aids, baby wipes, pain killers, and perhaps a plastic jug to go pee in on the fly when the long cracking whip of the supervisor allows no respite for a proper pit stop.

The permanent fixture CCAs, those who successfully opt on routes where the regulars are vacationing and have first dibs on most routes in their home office even when they can't, usually try to do a good job because they will have a few dozen grouchy, growling regulars barking at them if they do not.  The "Have Satchel will Travel" variety of CCA, on the other hand, is perhaps less inclined to be careful about whether the right mail goes in the right box today because they know they will be able to dodge criticism by disappearing into a different zip code tomorrow.  They have also learned that most of us aging regulars are quickly approaching the point when we will be admitted into "memory care" facilities, which means we are probably not going to recall the mortal mail sin an offending CCA committed three or four days ago.  For some of us, these homeless CCAs also sort of blend altogether into a faceless mass, or we might even give away an hour or two to a CCA without even knowing who it was that delivered an entire relay to the wrong block.

I don't think the "Have Satchel will Travel" CCAs deliberately try to do a bad job, I just think that they are given impossible expectations and are sometimes forced to cut corners to get back to the office in time.  Although most regulars will go back and fix those three or four houses we delivered out of sequence - because let's face it we all make mistakes, the CCA just wants to live to fight another Postal day and having a very short Postal mistake memory and an untroubled Postal conscience where boo-boos are concerned is helpful in stressful circumstances.

So my question is:  Will the CCA stand the test of time?  I think there is a reason why Postal workers and delivery employees such as UPS drivers are generally well paid, and this is because Americans appreciate getting their mail in the right place the first time.  This delivery accuracy requires motivated, well paid employees who take a sense of ownership of the neighborhoods that they deliver to.  When one day your are delivering to Hillcrest and the next day to North Park and the next day to San Ysidro or Pacific Beach how can you develop a sense of ownership over your mail delivery, especially when you are not making much money doing it?

But for the time being, it looks like the "Have Satchel will Travel" category of CCAs is not going away any time soon, but is actually increasing in size.  Supposedly the CCA percentage is capped at 15 percent by contract, but I just did some quick math on my own, I swear without my wife helping me, and I figured out that we have 25 full city routes in my office, plus 5 T-6s and one RC.  That makes 31 regular carriers, yet we also have 8 CCAs assigned to our station.  With a few deft touches of my calculator I figured out this makes 20.5 percent.  Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but that's five percent over what the contract allows, and that seems significant.

What's the deal folks?  Is this same stretching the boundaries of the contract happening everywhere, or is it an isolated incident?

My pipe-dream solution, which I don't think will happen, is to turn all of the CCAs into Regulars overnight; tomorrow if not earlier.  Then there will be no more lack of ownership of the mail, no more lack of motivation, and hopefully no more pissing in bottles.  Seems simple.


This photo of a mailbox that has stood the test of time is my own, for a change.

The Postal Tsunami is a powerful wave propelled by copious quantities of Starbuck's coffee, which is not cheap.  I have nothing to do with ad selection here, but unless these ads completely annoy or offend you I would appreciate if you could check out what my sponsors to the right and down below have to say.  Thanks for your support.

Postal Tsunami News Ripples for March 25th, 2015

By Mel Carriere

After a delay of a few days it is time for the Postal Tsunami to roll into action again.  A coworker slash Sherlock Holmes-style sleuth friend of mine, the one and only person who has been able to successfully deduce the secret identity of that Mysterious Militant Mailman Mel Carriere - called me out today because it has been a while since the Tsunami has flooded the Internet with its massive, murky, turbulent wave clogged with whatever mental debris flushes out from the dusty back corners of my mind, which hasn't been touched by a broom since my LLV was last swept, which was probably months ago.  Anyhow, even though my brain is clogged with that same dried equine waste product that comes from all the horse farms on my route; the stuff that is now actually starting to form tiny windblown dunes in the back of my postal vehicle, I will do my best to fulfill my blogging duties.

The problem is I couldn't really think of any out of the ordinary topics that I thought would be of any interest to anybody.  My supervisor did tell me yesterday that my DPS count was "irrelevant," which is a shocking but not surprising thing to say considering the source, but I didn't think I could squeeze enough out of that worn out old sponge to fill a blog.  So I decided to go online and check the Postal News, to see if there were any noteworthy events taking place on Planet Postal to merit an irreverent, perhaps snarky comment or two.  Fortunately I did find some low hanging mushy fruit there; albeit a little ripe, perhaps borderline rotten.  So here are my "news ripples" for March 25th, 2015.

• The USPS keeps raking in massive operating profits, such as the 1.4 billion the Postal Service earned through February of the current year, which is what you get after you take real revenue and then subtract real expenses.  But as usual, after this the "Postal Enhancement" bookkeepers get their slimy hands on it and suck the profits away into some abstract, hallucinatory pension fund that will probably never contribute a dollar to anybody's retirement. Then we are left with some imaginary, contrived, phantasmal loss that politicians will use as a weapon to say that we are broke and either need to be fixed or sold for scrap.

• Is Jason Chaffetz, the supposedly "kinder, gentler" replacement for "he who must not be named" Darrell Issa as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, starting to reveal his true colors?  When the man first took office he was busy redecorating the committee meeting room; hanging charming, folksy pictures of Post Offices and Postal Workers and taking down all the hideous eyesore Darrell Issa selfies that polluted the place before.  But now in a surprising statement he says he wants to flat out fire any federal employee who is delinquent on his or her taxes.  Gee, I wonder how many of Chaffetz's fat cat Republican financiers are tax evaders and tax cheats - but I'll bet you never will hear him say a word about depriving them of their livelihood.  Sure didn't take long for Chaffetz to take off his halo and reveal the Issa-style devil horns budding on his forehead.

• After record-breaking snowfalls in the winter of 2014-2015, some Postal Customers in Massachusetts actually have the audacity to complain about poor service.  As is usually the case with these complainers, I'll give you good odds that none of them were among the kind, understanding, appreciative postal customers who invited their letter carriers inside to drink a cup of hot chocolate and warm their frosty fingers.  They're probably also the same customers who never shovel the sidewalk.  And then they complain when their Mailman's numb, frostbitten digits drop an occasional letter at the neighbor's house.  Instead of belly-aching about what you could never do, why don't you get off your fat, cozy butt, brave that icy walkway and slippery steps you never clean off in front of your house, and GO GET YOUR MAIL YOURSELF.  Then again, your neighbors probably don't like you either.

That's probably enough ranting for one day.  I'm going back to lounging by the pool with these ducks who live on my route, that you can see in the photo above.  Maybe a dip in the pool will clean out some of that horsesh** from between my ears.

Below are links to the articles I commented upon.

Postal Operating Profits

Chaffetz Wants to Fire Tax Delinquent Federal Employees

Postal Complainers in Massachusetts

Duck Photo is my own.  Steal it if you want, I'll be flattered.

The Postal Tsunami is a powerful wave propelled by copious quantities of Starbuck's coffee, which is not cheap.  I have nothing to do with ad selection here, but unless these ads completely annoy or offend you I would appreciate if you could check out what my sponsors to the right and down below have to say.  Thanks for your support.

Does the PMG Really Want to "Keep Mail Relevant?"

By Mel Carriere

While addressing a crowd of fawning Postal Supervisors at the recent NAPUS conference, which I think stands for No Aptitude Plus Unabashed Suck-Ups, or something like that, our new Postmaster General Megan Brennan made a rather presumptuous statement that she was going to do everything in her power to keep mail relevant.  Even if I believed her, if the actions of her and her predecessor didn't indicate exactly the opposite, I would contend that there is nothing at all PMG Brennan could do to keep the mail relevant even if she wanted to.  I would contend that the power to keep the mail relevant belongs to me and you, the people working in the postal trenches.

Mail has been relevant in this country since its inception, ever since Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gave Congress authority to establish post offices and post roads.  Some of the post roads I drive on every day to do my job are a little bumpy and rutted, like the one you see above, and during our rare rain storms they get a little muddy too.  All the same I think we have enough post roads overall to get the job done, so the real question is whether we will have enough post offices to keep the mail relevant.

And this is where I get worried, wondering whether Brennan really desires to keep the mail relevant or whether she is continuing the trend started by Pat Donahoe to dismantle the assets and the goodwill of the Postal Service.

I don't understand how closing processing plants keeps the mail relevant.  I don't see how closing Post Offices keeps the mail relevant either.  There is a tiny Post Office in Valentine, Texas that gets Valentine cards from thousands of starry eyed lovers every year to have that unique, loving, heart-shaped postmark affixed.  This Post Office is slated for closure.  Even if this particular post office wasn't particularly noteworthy, imagine the struggle that rural residents have to go through to mail packages and buy stamps when their local Post Office has closed and they have to drive five towns over on bad, muddy roads to find the only place in five counties that still flies the flag.

I also don't comprehend how reducing first class mail delivery standards keeps the mail relevant.  Letters that used to require only two to three days to cross the country now regularly take a week or longer.  It took me five days to send a first class letter to my son, who lives a mere 500 miles up the coast.

So it looks like so far there isn't much Megan Brennan is doing to keep the mail relevant, but I don't think she could even if she wanted to.  It's out of her power completely.  The American public decides if the mail is relevant and it looks to me like they say the mail is more relevant than ever.  This country has undergone the great experiment with email and online bill pay, and now a backlash has occurred that demonstrates that the mail has not lost its relevancy, despite efforts to kill it by legislative action and by bold, prophetic pronouncements about good old fashioned letter mail being anachronistic.

The Postal Service is not anachronistic.  Some states are requiring the mailing of refund checks again because cyber-theft of tax returns is a very serious problem.  Cyber theft is one stop shopping.  Your pimple-faced neckbeard hacker cousin Albert can sit undetected in his Mom's basement eating fish-sticks, picking his nose and robbing from an entire database of thousands, maybe millions of refundees on his computer.  On the other hand, Butch and his gang of tattooed, crowbar wielding thugs can only break into a handful of CBU or gang boxes of maybe 16 deliveries each at a time, tops, and out of those 16 they're lucky if they can nab one check.  Furthermore, Butch is going to get spotted sooner or later, someone is going to call the police, and unlike meek and unassuming Albert, Butch's mother kicked him out of the house years ago so he has no basement to hide in to avoid Federal time.  Altogether Albert has an easier and more profitable gig.  Butch should have stayed in school and sat behind Albert, to copy off of his paper.

My point is that the mail is safer than online transactions, and more and more people are starting to realize this.  Unless you have a 572 digit password containing special characters from the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cyrillic alphabets, with a few Egyptian runes thrown in for extra security, your password is not really safe no matter where you go online these days.  We may even see a return to the mass popularity of good old fashioned mail order catalogs before it's all said and done.

Besides the American public, the people who really can keep the mail relevant are you and I, the letter carriers, clerks, mailhandlers, and other front line employees of the United States Postal Service.  We deal with the public every day, and we need to provide them with optimum customer service no matter how hard the fat, somewhat wobbly NAPUS members cracking the whip behind us are pushing us to go faster to move the line along, or go faster to get the route done.  We need to stop and take an extra 30 seconds to answer a question or point a person in the right direction; we need to make sure people can find a Post Office before they put their social security and bank account numbers into the hands of Albert and his buddies in the Nigerian mafia.

While the Brennan-worshiping NAPUS members sit around the buffet table at their conference, getting even fatter as they congratulate themselves about keeping the mail relevant, we're the ones out there really doing it.  It doesn't depend on technology, it doesn't depend on state of the art postal vehicles with bunk beds, potted plants, and air conditioning inside, it doesn't depend upon drones in the sky following letter carriers to the bathroom to take pictures of them peeing, it depends upon people.  So far the people say that the mail is STILL relevant, and we need to keep it that way.

Read about states returning to mailed tax refunds here

Picture of this lonely "post road" on my route is my own.


The Postal Tsunami is a powerful wave propelled by copious quantities of Starbuck's coffee, which is not cheap.  I have nothing to do with ad selection here, but unless these ads completely annoy or offend you I would appreciate if you could check out what my sponsors to the right and down below have to say.  Thanks for your support.

DOIS Time Warp

By Mel Carriere


I am more than ever convinced that the the Delivery Operations Information System (DOIS), the program that is used by the post office to befuddle, harass, cheat and push letter carriers to the point of exhaustion and injury every day, must have been created right at the event horizon of a Black Hole, the kind of place where Einstein tells us that reality is severely distorted and time moves in a strange, non linear, unpredictable fashion.  I am absolutely certain that the DOIS programmers were imported from some warped world on the edge of such a Black Hole, a place where time is not governed by the same physical laws that it is here and the melting clocks on the wall come to a complete stop right at six hours and thirty five minutes.  You may say that this is some kind of hyper-fantastic science fiction scenario straight out of George Noory, but I contend it is the most believable theory to date. I paraphrase Occam's Razor, the principle that says that the simplest answer is often the best. How else can you explain DOIS without resorting to advanced physics that your supervisor certainly never took because he or she couldn't even get past the spelling portion of the SAT.

You may say that this is complete, utter nonsense, but when I look at the DOIS Workhour/Workload report posted by the time clock every day why else is the street time for my route always listed as six hours and thirty five minutes?  Only on a world where time comes to a complete stop would this make sense, and hence my belief that the DOIS programmers are not of this world.  No offense to these unfortunate alien beings, who were probably brought to this planet without valid work visas, then locked in a dark janitor's closet at 475 L'enfant Plaza SW and forced to toil away off the clock with no lunch or breaks while a supervisor occasionally beat them up with a clipboard and perhaps followed them to the bathroom.  But the fact is, DOIS defies every notion of time.

To be fair, this system works great on planet DOIS, where it is an award winning marvel of software engineering, but on Earth it has its limitations.  For instance, on planet DOIS it doesn't matter if you have 1,000 or 3,000 pieces of DPS, because the warped clock stops at six hours and thirty five minutes no matter what.  On planet DOIS it also doesn't matter whether you have the 30 parcels that were your "base" or 60 parcels.  Once again the clock stops and the happy, untroubled little letter carrier is able to get the route done in the same amount of time no matter what, every day.

Regretfully enough, on planet Earth none of these conditions exist, and no matter how Postal supervisors insist to the contrary, those of us who are in touch with reality know quite well that 3,000 pieces of DPS takes us, well, perhaps three times as long to deliver as 1,000, and double the parcels take, hmmm, about double the amount of time to drop off.  This is why, while DOIS kicks butt everywhere else throughout the galaxy, it just does not work on Earth.

Furthermore, although on Planet DOIS the postal supervisors are completely benevolent towards the letter carriers and never put unrealistic expectations upon them, on Planet Earth the supervisors use DOIS to their devious advantage while completely not paying attention when the mysterious alien hieroglyphs of DOIS work in favor of the letter carrier.  For instance, you supervisor will most certainly scold you on Tuesday because you were an hour over your "fixed" imaginary street time on Monday, but if you have heavy mail to case and will be leaving the office late, your Earthling supervisor suddenly doesn't care about your "fixed" street time and still insists that you have "undertime" and must pivot.

On Planet DOIS, perched precariously there on the edge of the "event horizon," no matter how many sick calls there are the letter carriers can pivot into infinity because, as I said before and must say again, time comes to a complete standstill at six hours and thirty five minutes.  On Earth the seconds keep on ticking away, however, even if the broken clock in the swing room is only correct twice a day.  I would love to say more on the subject but something has come up and I have to go.  It seems that the warped time clock on the workroom floor, severely distorted by the relativistic effects of DOIS math, is dripping slowly down the wall and I think I should call HAZMAT...



The Salvador Dali painting above is attributed to:  "The Persistence of Memory" by Image taken from About.com. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Persistence_of_Memory.jpg#/media/File:The_Persistence_of_Memory.jpg

The Postal Tsunami is a powerful wave propelled by copious quantities of Starbuck's coffee, which is not cheap.  I have nothing to do with ad selection here, but unless these ads completely annoy or offend you I would appreciate if you could check out what my sponsors to the right and down below have to say.  Thanks for your support.

Postal Stockholm Syndrome Supervisors

By Mel Carriere

Being a Postal Supervisor involves undergoing a surprisingly quick brainwashing process in which everything you knew to be reality as a letter carrier is quickly forgotten about in the barrage of psychological warfare that assails you from above.  The truth is, as a new 204b you feel so satisfied to have been chosen as one of the team that you are willing to accept and echo whatever BS comes down the pipeline just to fit in with the rest of the brainwashed crowd that it is your sad lot to work with now.

Religious cults are known to brainwash their new adherents by subjecting them to relentless "reprogramming" techniques, in which the same key phrases are repeated over and over again in loud, frightening tones to the weary, sleep-deprived initiates.  The Postal Service is not much different.  When I was supervising I was given a daily verbal beat down by the Area Manager, who had a long row of books in his office filled with his favorite management maxims that he would force feed us 204b underlings with.  He called this "creative tension," one of the terms he pulled from the books, but I doubt he ever read these things thoroughly or even halfway understood the concepts in them.  I think he would just pull random phrases from the pages that seemed to justify his psychotic tendencies.

As is the case with victims of the "Stockholm Syndrome," or capture bonding phenomenon, after a while the hostages (204bs in this case) will begin to feel positive feelings towards their captors; these being Area Managers, Postmasters, Station Managers, and other such Postal terrorists.  The definition I found on Wikipedia describes the Postal situation perfectly by saying that this type of capture bonding describes "strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other."  I couldn't have said it better.  After awhile you actually start to think that the Area Manager, the monster who calls you into the daily telecon to give you your daily thrashing, actually likes you just because he asks how your family is doing every now and then.

Once you quit supervising it takes a while to break loose from this brainwashing.  It took me a couple of years to free my brain from the Stockholm Syndrome, and I might not be completely deprogrammed yet.  A friend of mine, who is dying to be mentioned in this blog in either a good or bad way, once told me after I went back to carrying mail that I needed to quit thinking like a supervisor.  He was right, although it took a while to realize it.

The reason I bring this up is that the other day, when I was doing some AMS activities in the office on the computer, one of my supervisors subjected me to a barrage of BS about how easy the routes in our station are and how when we get walked we'll all be shocked when we're back from the street by 2 PM.  I know this 2 PM thing is the Area Manager's new mantra that he makes his supervisor cult chant over and over again every day, because another supervisor in my office said the exact same thing a couple of days ago - two o'clock on the dot.  In a past life this supervisor used to be a letter carrier, so I suppose he thinks this qualifies him to pass judgement on all of the untold thousands of routes in the Postal Service.  Anyway, he amused me by declaring which routes on my old T-6 string were long and which ones were not, even though he hasn't carried any of them, ever.  In his informed opinion, naturally the routes of the carriers that suck up to him are the long ones and the carriers that give him a little resistance every day are the ones that will be back by 2 PM in his brainwashed, pipe dream, postal fantasy route inspection scenario.

I don't think he liked it when I disagreed with him.  He probably thinks I'm still in the cult and I'm going to chant right along with him, right after I shave my head except for that little pony tail I'll leave in the back.  But instead I responded that a lot of the routes in the office are actually overburdened.  Furthermore, most of the carriers in our office are old pros at getting walked and I have never seen any of them return by 2 PM after a route inspection, even when mail volume was at its lowest.

So who really will be shocked when that fateful route inspection day rolls around?  I would like to think that this supervisor, who thinks all letters carriers are cheaters, liars and malingerers, will be man enough to admit that he was wrong when he sees that most of us are running our butts off. But I really doubt he will be so gracious to acknowledge his mistake, because when postal brainwashing takes place it is rapid and thorough, and God help us all when this distorted Stockholm Syndrome view completely replaces reality.


Photo of this 775 tub art is my own, but I did not create this Picasso-like Postal painting, although I do agree with its philosophy.


The Postal Tsunami is a powerful wave propelled by copious quantities of Starbuck's coffee, which is not cheap.  I have nothing to do with ad selection here, but unless these ads completely annoy or offend you I would appreciate if you could check out what my sponsors to the right and down below have to say.  Thanks for your support.

Five PM Frenzy - Creepy Things that Alien Body Snatcher Supervisors Say

By Mel Carriere

At long last the blessing of moisture has returned to the parched Southern California landscape, as you can see from this picture taken on my route from my LLV.  We actually had a brief thunderstorm on Monday that delivered exactly two bolts of lighting, two more than our annual allotment of atmospheric electrical activity.  The second bolt was so close it set off all the car alarms on the street and had me wishing I never removed that extra pair of underwear from my satchel.  But in spite of the lightning the storm kind of fizzled, and reminded me of the Jackie Chan version of The Karate Kid, where Jackie is trying to teach Jaden Smith to learn karate by having him drop his jacket on the floor. "Pick it up, Put it on, Take it off.  Pick it up, Put it on.  Take it off," he commands. That was me all day with my raincoat.

Jackie Chan has some strange supervision techniques, but in spite of his unconventional teaching methods he seems to be an honest and straightforward leader, at least in the movies.  The Postal Service, however, is not Hollywood, and the script our supervisors go by is more like a low budget science fiction movie where the aliens have landed and taken on human form.  Sure they give the expected sweet and sappy motivational speeches on the workroom floor, but you should hear the hair raising things they say when they think letter carriers are not listening.  At that time they turn into regular body snatchers - all blank, soulless smiles on the outside but possessed by a horrible blood-sucking alien worm within.

Lately we have been in a five PM frenzy in our district, where everyone in the office has to be clocked off street by the absolute drop dead time of 1700.  Our Area Manager gave us a little "get you sh-- together" speech on Monday where he tried to justify this from a customer service angle; telling us that our district is something like 54th out of 62 in customer service.  He claims that the auditors who measure customer service deliberately go out and open mailboxes after 5 PM, and this is the reason why 5 is now the new 6, at least where I work.

One unlucky CCA had the misfortune of clocking in at 5:05 that same day of the speech.  As I was docking my scanner I heard the supervisor give this poor kid a pretty severe verbal beat down, but I guess this wasn't enough for her.  I suppose she felt she needed to make points with mission control on the home planet, so as I stood there filling out a 1571 I listened to her eagerly spelling out the CCA's name for the Area Manager on the phone.  She had a beaming ear to ear grin on her face when she did it.  Then after she hung up the phone she actually high-fived the other supervisor, just like Borat did in the movie when the telegram messenger tells him that his wife has died.  Like Borat, supervisors are entertained by some really weird things.  Meanwhile, who knows what is going to happen to this CCA, who is a very likable young man.  He just bought a new truck.  Yeah I hate him because he drives a better car than me but this really sucks.

When I was growing up I was taught that tattle-telling was dirty and underhanded, but after 20 plus years in the Post Office I have finally figured out that this is actually the way to get ahead in life, which is probably why I am stuck where I am.  I think most people in postal upper management got there walking on a carpet of the bleeding bodies of the co-workers they disposed of, and that is why they actually appreciate people who throw other people under the bus to get ahead.  There is a sort of twisted, sinister sense of camaraderie they feel with people who use the same methods; like two maggots feasting on the same lump of rotting flesh.  Eeew - Is that a little too poetic, or what?

There are other unbelievably creepy and sinister conversations I overheard among these alien life forms this week, but I'll save them for later.  Maybe that one female supervisor thinks I'm not listening, that I'm not onto her, but the B-52s told me who she really is in a secret song message:

She came from Planet Claire

I knew she came from there

She drove a Plymouth Satellite

Faster than the speed of light


Planet Claire has pink air

All the trees are red

No one ever dies there

No one has a head


Photo taken from Planet Earth, not Planet Claire, on my own cell phone.

Lyrics from the B-52s song "Planet Claire"


The Postal Tsunami is a powerful wave propelled by copious quantities of Starbuck's coffee, which is not cheap.  I have nothing to do with ad selection here, but unless these ads completely annoy or offend you I would appreciate if you could check out what my sponsors to the right and down below have to say.  Thanks for your support.