Political Mail Tsunami 2018 - Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

By Mel Carriere

I'm a couple weeks late reporting my analysis of the 2018 mid term political mail season, but the deep paper cuts gouged into my skin from the razor thin edges of those shiny cardboard fliers are just now healing over to where I have recovered normal use of my hands for common everyday tasks - like writing and for giving my evaluation, on a scale of one to one, of the driving skills of the guy who tailgated me on the freeway today.  I could have slit my own wrists with the knife edges of those useless scraps of paper, which must have defoliated all the forests between here and the Arctic Circle, and there were times I wanted to.

But the exhausting grind is over, and I suppose I should give thanks for that when I slice into that bird this week. It will be stuffed fatter than normal because of the overtime from working two days off and the double time I got casing mail when I should have been tucked in sawing logs in dreamland, instead of aiding and abetting the sawing down of hectares of old growth forest so we can find out why your opponent is unfit for office just because he picked his nose at a PTA meeting.

Here's a little bit of heresy to make you squirm in your skivvies.  We can't even blame Donald Trump for the biggest mass decimation of trees since Agent Orange cleared the South Vietnam jungles.  Here in California, an open primary state, there were very few Republicans on the ballot, but our normally green Dems were more than willing to shed their leaves and let the lumberjacks turn the woods into pulp mill fodder, in the interests of one party democracy.  Although our most prescient pundits predicted heated Congressional battles stoked by the embers from the Don's flaming hair, the endless reams of propaganda I had to sort through every day were mostly produced for city council elections, plus a slate of propositions longer than all the begats in the lists of Old Testament patriarchs.

Although I do not generally approve of fat-shaming, I declare fair game on those political candidates who appear to have fattened themselves at the taxpayer trough.  Taking cheap shots from behind the protective barrier of this disclaimer, I now feel safe to report that the political battle producing the greatest number of casualties among the stately, centuries old California coastal redwoods was between two candidates I can only call fat and fatter.  Both of these office seekers were so engorged on their own smugness that the combined photo shop skills of a crack team of computer geeks working around the clock from their mothers' basements were unable to trim them down onto a standard flat dimension mailer.  They were forced to resort to sheaves of paper roughly the size of movie posters just for a single head shot.  All postal mailing requirements were suspended for this endeavor, and the rustle of folding paper in post offices throughout our state pinged the seismograph at Cal Tech.  

For roughly two to three weeks I was forced to endure the disagreeable visage of both of these corpulent candidates, firing accusations of obesity at one another, something along the lines of "I'm not fat, you're fat," answered by "I'm fat, but you're fatter."  Not exactly engaging political discourse in the spirit of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

For these reasons I confidently declare the California 2018 mid terms to have produced the worst political mail ever.  You say Mel, how could you make such an outlandish declaration? Every political mail season is bad, this one was no different.  Time has merely healed your psychological paper cuts from previous elections. In response I say that you are fat, and also that I have statistics to prove it, along with some lies and damn lies to pepper your potato.

I am a stats nerd, probably because of some congenital defect from toxic metals in the Rio Grande flowing through the tap in my birthplace of El Paso, Texas.  I keep spreadsheets on nearly every aspect of my life.  While you are having fun throwing them down in some sports bar, I am cataloging your drinks consumed per hour and the progression of your obscenities launched at the referee as you approach complete inebriation.  This is my idea of fun, and you can form your own opinion of me accordingly.  So naturally I document the pertinent numbers on my postal route, including average street and office time worked.  Therefore, I can present you with real numbers that prove how exceptionally burdensome the 2018 fall election season was.

To arrive at my results, I pulled the data three weeks prior to the June 5 primary, and three weeks prior to the November 6 general election, the approximate periods in which the political mail was gushing like a Tijuana sewage break into the Pacific Ocean. Except, comparatively speaking, the primary was the trickle off an iceberg slowly floating southward, whereas the general election was the flood caused by that same berg ripping open the hull of the Titanic.

By way of baseline, the average non-political mail delivery day on my route for 2018 to date is 7.70 street, 1.14 office.  This was actually much lower prior to the fall, but has been boosted by holiday advertising and a corresponding uptick in parcel volume.

In contrast, the June primary average was 7.73 street, 1.34 office.  The political mail volume barely made a difference on the street, and resulted in 20 extra clicks in the office.  Altogether this added up to 23 additional hundredths, or about 15 minutes for those of you who can't do postal math.  At the time it seemed like it sure did suck and we were all glad it was over, but in light of the barrage to follow, to quote the poet Morrissey, William it was really nothing.

Okay kiddies, buckle in because the ride gets bumpy now.  The fall numbers were a staggering exponential leap, a dwarf sun going supernova.  The street time for this tree killing orgy was 8.29, while the office total for the shore to shore river raft of felled trunks was 1.82.  Altogether this surge from the drain pipes of our lovely rotund candidates mouths added up to 56 clicks street, 48 clicks office, 1.04 total, above the June primary.  Add 23 clicks to that and you get 1.23 over non-political average, roughly an hour and fifteen minutes.

It was so bad that our oft ostrich emulating supervisors couldn't even bury their heads in the sand and pretend it wasn't happening. They were throwing around blank check overtime slips like ticker tape at a Super Bowl victory parade. All of the sudden management remembered what full tour OT was, and I was working all my scheduled days off plus several hours double time during this period. The Postal Elves were busy after normal closing time, way into the wee hours, casing up those knife-edged fliers, so sharp you can shave with them. On the street I was sometimes juggling 5 to 7 bundles at my CBUs, a very curious circus act, throwing all opposing parties into the same boxes and watching ruefully as customers, in one swift motion, without prejudice or party affiliation, tossed every candidate and proposition into nearby trash receptacles.

The circle of life thus rolls on, from tree to paper, which then goes directly into the compost pile to fuel the growth of new seedlings, eventually to be chopped down and ground into pulp to display the pulpy faces of future electoral participants, most of whom will, of course, decry the evils of deforestation.

Mel doesn't question, Mel just delivers the mail.  Then, being a postal soldier of Fortune, he cashes the overtime check. 

Please share how your political mail season went in the comments section.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons, by Tony Hisgett

Postal Tsunami Musical Guest

The Smiths - William It Was Really Nothing

Bored Journalists Crucify Big Apple Letter Carrier

By Mel Carriere

A deadly hurricane is about to body slam the Carolina coast.

Gas leaks cause multiple explosions in Massachusetts.

A sadistic drug addict Mom selfishly downs her dying daughter's pain medication.

All shocking news nuggets, but the story that led my Google news feed on Thursday, September 13, was a CBS article supposedly depicting a letter carrier throwing packages out of the back of his vehicle.

Can you say "slow news day?" Has the contempt people feel for the American letter carrier reached such heights that this mundane occurrence trumps a storm that has led to the evacuation of millions, and even trumps Trump, who was refreshingly absent from my Chrome home page for a change.

The article headline blared out "A POSTAL DELIVERY WORKER CAUGHT ON VIDEO MISHANDLING THE MAIL." A blurb below the banner then added "Exclusive: US Postal Worker Caught on Video Tossing Packages Into The Street."

Exclusive? Really?  This is the best the Big Apple journalists at this CBS affiliate could come up with?  New York is supposedly the Pinnacle of journalism, but here they are trying to sell us something that goes on thousands of times a day as "exclusive?" Were there no shootings or muggings or robberies to cover?  Maybe there were, but they didn't want to get off of their pampered Ivy League journalism school asses to get some real news, in places that might be dangerous. 

So instead, news reporters looked out the window to pick some low hanging fruit.  Fruit hanging so low that had it been attached to the tree in Sir Isaac Newton's yard it wouldn't have fallen far enough to wake him from his nap and give him the idea for the theory of gravitation.  Then we would really be screwed, because 60s rockers Blood, Sweat and Tears would have never written the famous Spinning Wheel song that tells us what goes up must come down.  What kind of deprived childhood would I have then had, without listening to that tune on my Dad's 8 track tape player?

All complicated principles of cause and effect aside, I went ahead and watched the video.  I did so because I am always skeptical of such claims, believing most of them to be exaggerated or misinterpreted.  In a revealing moment of full disclosure, I confess quite frankly that I, an American letter carrier, have done worse than what appears on the video, but never for malicious reasons or out of laziness.

Here's another shocking revelation:  If the public knew what happens to their packages on airport ramps and while being sorted in postal facilities, the supposed outrages in the video would be tame by comparison, like sitting down for a marathon of My Little Pony after binge watching slasher flicks Halloween Eve.

When I say I have done worse, I don't mean once like ten years ago, I mean two or three times a week and as recently as, maybe yesterday.  I think it was yesterday that I heaved a package over a fence.  The gate through the fence was locked and my shouts produced no response.  So I chucked it and ran, but not before first getting a feel for the parcel and calculating whether anything inside was fragile or if the parcel was so heavy it would be crushed by its own mass at the end of its Newtonian plunge to Earth.  Had it been either of these things I would have brought it back to the Post Office because of A) Customer Service, but mostly B) I don't want to hurt myself because my purple Hulk shorts are in the laundry and I won't be playing super hero without them.

These are the type of calculated assessments letter carriers have to make every day to get the job done, because there ain't enough room at the old PO to warehouse all the parcels that have to be dropped behind locked gates. 99.99 percent of the time they turn out to be good decisions, but we always run the risk of winding up as some lazy a'hole journalist's "Exclusive.". This is because on video, the probing postal Peeping Tom eye can't tell how heavy or how fragile the packages are.  On video they all look alike.

Now let me tell you a little about what kind of atrocities are visited upon America's packages before letter carriers even touch them, desecrations that will never end up as "Exclusives" or viral You Tube flicks because they occur in places the prying public eye does not have access to.

A friend of mine used to be an airport baggage handler. Part of his job was loading mail on planes.  Sometimes he and his fellow handlers would chuck mail sacks out of airplane baggage compartments, using the same spinning windup as Olympic hammer throwers.  If they were not too rushed they might compete for distance and accuracy, but occasionally they were not too accurate and the mail sacks would crash onto the ramp from high up. Talk about aviation disasters!  The baggage handlers had absolutely no idea if anything fragile was in those mail sacks and, for the kind of wages they were getting, I don't think they cared.

Then we have our merry band of sleep deprived Postal Clerks taking three pointers with grandma's care packages, consumer electronics and beauty supply products at 4 AM, the latter which they could really use themselves, because at that wee witching hour they look a mess.  

The disheveled, insomniac clerks toss all of these packages into APCs and lobster cages, where the first ones in get pancaked by those landing on top.  Just like carriers, our ever fastidious parcel sorters size up parcels that may break or break them on the downward arc and wheel these bulky behemoths over to the carrier's cases.  They do this because A) Customer Service, and B) they are going to be the ones to deal with the irate recipients of squished laundry detergent and pulverised dogfood at the window later.

Some of these clerks have as keen a three point aim as Steve Kerr, the all time NBA percentage leader from the arc.  Some of them shoot clanking bricks like Shaq did at the free throw line, meaning that later there is a lot of parcel redistribution among carriers.  If the public had video access to this wild orgy of flying cardboard, there would be a Congressional Investigation.  After that, the thousands of packages that move through the post office daily would never be sorted on time, without tripling the clerk work force.

Back to the video in question.  After watching it a few times, I believe the evidence of this candid camera carrier's culpability is inconclusive.  Is he really an uncaring, unprofessional douchebag, as the deskbound media moguls behind the film suggest, or is he the innocent victim of a bloodthirsty postal Inquisition panel who doesn't understand what it is looking at?  Here's a link:

Letter Carrier Throws Packages

I saw exactly one package fly out of the back of his vehicle. The same flying package is repeated for emphasis via sneaky photo shop techniques taught at Ivy League journalism schools, but it is the same package.  The box in question appears to be a light one, because it definitely bounces a little.  Perhaps the carrier thought it was safe to throw it.  We don't know, because we are not given samples of other packages being tossed.

After this, there is a sort of comedy relief moment when a package falls over on the carrier's hand truck, and he nudges it back into place with his foot, not kicking it by any means but just moving it with his foot.  Then we encounter a big gap in the footage sequence, which returns with a fully loaded dolly. What happened in the interim? Was there more parcel throwing? I'm guessing that if there had been, it would not have been edited out.  I'm thinking that the rest of the dolly loading process was pretty uneventful.  But conspiracy theorists will claim that parcels being thrown from the grassy knoll were edited out here.

Now follows what I suppose is the most egregious thing in the whole affair, when the carrier abandons the stacked dolly to walk a couple parcels inside that won't fit.  In so doing, he allegedly leaves the loaded hand truck unattended for a full minute and a half.  Or does he? In light of the other edits visited upon the video in the CBS cutting room, how do we know for sure it was a minute and a half?  And how do we know there wasn't some trusted acquaintance of the carrier off camera, maybe standing on the sidewalk taking his smoke break?  "Hey homey keep an eye on my stuff here for a minute here will ya?" "Yeah no probs man." Stuff like that happens.

I am not absolving this letter carrier of all negligence, I am only suggesting that, in light of the scanty evidence available in the video, all of you Postal Pontius Pilates should refrain from crucifying him, unless ye be completely without sin along the same lines.  Bearing the Cain's mark of a parcel thrower on my own brow, I will not judge.

One or two more things and then I'll stop.  First of all, if postal employees handled the mail as delicately as the public and underworked Ivy League journalists expect, postage prices would quadruple overnight.  So in lieu of such an outrageous rate hike, I'll give these parties the same advice for secure mailing that my Daddy gave me before handing over the car keys, along with other sundry items, for possible use on my first date. 

"You better wrap that rascal son," Daddy said with a wink.

Postal Tsunami Musical Guest - Blood, Sweat and Tears "Spinning Wheel"

Image a screenshot from Mel's phone of New York CBS local

Light Summer Mail?

By Mel Carriere

There is really no appropriate adjective to describe the evaluation process letter carriers put new managers through when they assume control of a new office.  The new bosses typically come in fanning their tail feathers like peacocks, pounding their chests like territorial apes, marking boundaries YOU SHALL NOT PASS with verbal territorial pissings that form steaming, stinking puddles at morning service talks. Don't eat that yellow snow as you watch newbie boss make his debut.

Is interesting a good word for these opening dramatics?  Not unless you're the type who thinks train derailments, with dozens of casualties plummeting from a railroad bridge into a river below, are interesting.

How about entertaining? Some people back in the early 70s thought the Watergate hearings were entertaining - scores of monotone senators and lawyers saying the same thing in a multitude of equally mind-numbing ways when all this nine year old really wanted to do was watch I Dream of Jeannie, which had been preempted by the witch hunt.

Curios would seem to be the operative word, though this would be a very jaded curiosity, nudged along reluctantly by a lack of hope that things will change for the better as the new alpha dog takes over.  When scrutinizing new managers, letter carriers are indeed curious, but in the same way as biologists hiding in a blind in the deep forest to observe a heretofore little studied species.  BS meters and other sensors are deployed at the ready, but there is really no expectation that the behaviors of this new knuckle dragger will be radically different from the last one.

For a regrettably brief time period our station had a manager who did not ambulate upon his knuckles, one who actually acknowledged there is a reality that cannot be quantified by the computerized abstractions of DOIS, someone who was surprisingly willing to listen to our suggestions.  Naturally this could not continue.  When upper management caught wind that carriers liked their boss they had no choice but to replace him with someone made in their image, another thick headed brute who blindly accepted the pipe dream projections of isolated, air conditioned cubicle jockeys somewhere out there in the kingdom of far far away.  Their gospel turned out to be his mantra, his rosary, his deliverance from the evil of having to think for himself.

As usual, the new boss tried to soften up our formidable anti-bs defense system by magnanimously declaring he was not there to discipline, but to teach, coach, and mentor.  This triumvirate of untrustworthy tripe, this truckload of trivial treacle made me wonder how effective the teaching, coaching and mentoring could be from someone who had jumped straight from 204b to station manager, without any intervening layovers in the supervisor trenches.

The neophyte slathered on his syrup rather thickly, but the pancake underneath was as dry and insipid as before.  Apparently, our manager's game plan was to use cute and cuddly catch phrases to get us to pole vault through his impossibly high mail hoops.  His favorite verse in his Bible of bewitching BS turned out to be light summer mail.  Over the course of the next couple of weeks, he bandied the term about like an exorcist sprinkling holy water to cast out overtime demons.  He was a cult leader convincing his flock to drink the kool-aid that will transport them to the magic mother ship in the sky.  Light summer mail was a real thing, he assured us, sanctioned by some official postal Dead Sea Scrolls seen only by a privileged cabal.  Therefore, in spite of our misgivings, we were expected to turn our eyes from the mountains of mail before us toward the calendar, then go out into the world and perform mail miracles, empowered now as we were by the voodoo incantation of light summer mail.

The problem with the doctrine of light summer mail is that the postal scribes cloistered away in wilderness caves hundreds of years ago, copying down the sacred revelations for posterity, had never heard of the Internet.  They knew nothing of e-commerce.  The Amazon apocalypse had not been prophesied.  These soothsayers could not foresee a future where 100 plus packages had to be wedged into the tiny LLV cargo compartment with a shoehorn.  Heck, at the time the postal sages were writing down their dreams and visions about light summer mail we were still delivering out of Pintos.  When I was a PTF, a few short centuries ago when light summer mail still applied, one day due to a vehicle crisis I delivered an entire route from the back seat of my Chevy Cavalier.

In the here and now, the mail no longer respects the seasons.  Admittedly, the letters and flats are lighter during the days when the sun loiters long in the loft and the mercury makes mailmen melt, but parcels know no pause, they carry no calendar.  Postal packages don't disappear to some time share in Florida during the dog days. They take no vacations.

What our hypnotist manager also neglected to tell us, surely a simple oversight on his part, was that Amazon Prime Sunday fell on July 16th.  The light in light summer mail  I experienced after that was the light headedness I suffered lugging a fifty pound baby carriage up a flight of stairs, tossing a hefty box of dogfood over a fence, and wearing off the fingerprints on my scanning finger pressing that damn button 146 times.  I can now commit crimes with impunity, because there are no more identifying marks on my digits.

Like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, light summer mail is a nice fable to make the kiddies behave themselves, but my new boss is blinded by the light if he thinks he can light a fire under my old, sagging, dragging ass to get this mountain of light summer mail to move any faster.

Postal Tsunami Musical Guest Bruce Springsteen

Another Boss blinded by the light summer mail

Begin your precarious journey into The Gasden Purchase, a novel by Mel Carriere

In Memory of Letter Carrier Peggy Frank - Could the Scanner Have Saved Her?

By Mel Carriere

By now, everybody within the Postal Tsunami's destructive swale, which sounds swell but is sometimes not, has heard the story of Peggy Frank, a letter carrier who was found dead in her truck on Friday, July 6th, in the Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles.  Then again, maybe you haven't gotten the message.  Here in southern California we have been inundated with heat related safety talks since the incident, which occurred on a heatwave day when the temperature hit a record breaking 117 in that area. Perhaps, however, in the flyover hotbox/icebox where you live, such weather related fatalities are commonplace and the event did not cause much of a stir.

I am certainly not expecting those of you letter carriers who bundle up like Eskimos in winter and strip to the skivvies in summer to do much crying for us out here in Socal, just because our mercury hit triple digits for one week.  What I would like to do, rather, is use this incident to rant over the question of why the technology the Postal Service uses to inflict evil upon carriers, through the dark magic of that little blue talisman called your scanner, cannot also be used to do good, especially when a climatic crisis requires it.

First a few facts. Peggy Frank was pronounced dead at 3:35 PM on that fatal Fry-day after a "bystander or co-worker" found her unresponsive in her postal vehicle.  Attempts by emergency personnel to revive her failed.  Several reports state Ms. Frank had just returned from medical leave, one article saying she had been out with a broken ankle.  Although Frank had suffered heat related incidents in the past, the severe heat has not yet been identified as the cause of death, pending "additional tests." Hmm... Methinks if I were wagering on that horse race, with the temperature the day of her tragic demise approaching infinity and beyond, that old nag Heat Stroke would be safe money.

I suppose we will learn the grim details soon enough. In the meantime, the woeful, premature passing of a grandmother who was nearing retirement prompts me to wonder why, if the Postal Service is equipped with technology that can monitor every step you take, snap a surreptitious scanner photo of you picking your nose or send the alarms in the scanner-snoop war room howling when you exceed your lunch by so much as a second,  why can't they do the same thing to find out if you are safe during a massive heat wave? If safety is, indeed, the mother of all priorities management pays lip service to every day at service talks, this would be a cool thing to do when it's warm.

Even before this incident, I had been pondering other benevolent uses for our postal scanners. For instance, could we not use their GPS data to verify that letter carriers are taking their 30 minute lunches, as required by contract and by law?  I'm sure managers as well as carriers are dedicated to the proposition of following state law, right? So in addition to a stationary report, our favorite sunglass-clad Agent Smith, monitoring the sanctity of the Postal Matrix up there in the warped consciousness where there is no red pill to return to reality, could also run a "non-stationary" report, to pinpoint those carriers' scanners that do not have a half hour pause in activity, meaning  they skipped their lunches. Certainly the Postal Service recognizes the importance of adequate rest and nutrition to safety.  Seeing as how my manager swears on a daily basis that seeing us all go home safe is his number one priority, I'm surprised he never thought of this.

But the burning question in the here and now is whether that  little blue leash tethering us to Postal Big Brother could have saved letter carrier Peggy Frank. The staff of the Postal Damage Control Department did not weigh in on this issue, even though they were in a higher state of readiness than whoever was supposed to be manning Spy Central that sizzling San Fernando day. In contrast to the sluggards at the Postal peep show, the ensuing response from corporate communications was quickly forthcoming, though poorly fumigated, reeking mightily of "Pass the Buck," to me.

As the crisis unveiled, Postal spokeswoman Evelyn Ramirez was quoted in the  LA Daily news as saying that USPS employees deliver mail in “...all kinds of weather, including high temperatures... The Postal Service strives to ensure that they have the tools and training to do so safely."

I wonder what sort of tools and training Ms. Ramirez is talking about.  As a letter carrier, my only training for heat related incidents is being reminded to hydrate and call the supervisor in an emergency.  These seem to be instinctive, no-brainer, no training required actions imbued within us before we pop out of the womb. The reptile brain stem says drink when you are thirsty and cry for Mommy when you need help, although we know how appeals to stressed out postal mommies wind up.  Can you rest a few minutes and give me another swing?  One teeny-weeny swingy?  Okay, how about an hour? I'll tell you what.  I'll give you overtime so you can cool down and finish the route.

Here's an anecdotal example of how our postal parents are trained to handle heat related incidents.  A few summers ago a new CCA at our station suffered heat exhaustion and was unable to continue.  She called the hot line repeatedly but, surprise surprise, no one answered.  Finally she called another letter carrier who swung by, scraped her off the sidewalk and got her help. 

This anecdote is not an isolated occurrence. The Los Angeles Daily news reported that in 2016 "...OSHA cited the Postal Service after two Des Moines, Iowa, workers suffered heat-related illness while delivering mail that past summer. The agency found that the two mail carriers, one of whom was told to continue walking her route despite feeling ill, were exposed to excessive heat." Thus we see that this cool response to heat-related complaints is pervasive, sweeping across the breadth of the organization, and that our so called beat the heat training is mostly a lot of hot air.

So much for training, but let's get back to these so-called tools Ms. Ramirez claims are in place to protect us against heat incidents. Could the postal spin doctors be  speaking of the scanner messages we get each morning that remind us to drink water, like anyone needs to be reminded when one's sweat and body heat are so thick they create a miniature weather front inside the pith helmet?   There are tools potentially more effective than these inspirational morning eye openers, but they are not being used.  For instance, a simple call from whoever is on watch in that converted broom closet at the stationary report command center, warning that such and such carrier has been in one place over half an hour, could be used to save someone from blue lining in postal blue.  No carrier likes to be spied on, but if the spies in the sky are already on post, couldn't they use their powers for good on occasion?

Instead, my eyes burn with the fumes from the smokescreen being fanned up to cover complicity in this heartbreaking development in Woodland Hills. I suspect that, in reality, Ms. Ramirez' quip about "tools and training" may be the Postal Service's preemptive strike to shift blame from USPS management onto poor Ms. Frank. Accidents happen, death is inevitable for all, but I ask the question why the same resources used to monitor our every move couldn't have been used to rescue poor Peggy - may the postal angels transport her to glory in that sweet, air-conditioned LLV in the sky.

Photo from fox5dc.com

Postal Lottery Losers Crash and Burn

By Mel Carrier

For many postal customers, the rough idle and clunking valves of passing postal vehicles is the sweet music of a clanging cash register, sounding out like the trumpets of angels as the eagerly anticipated largesse of the heavens open up and manna floats down in the form of expected cash settlements.  In most of these incidents, the neon flashing dollar signs in the eyes of money hungry customers are quickly doused by the tight fisted tactics of stingy Uncle Sam, who doesn't open his fat wallet without a fight, but it doesn't keep eager, enterprising capitalists from trying.  Raised to depend upon government paychecks, and reared with a sense of entitlement, who can resist the temptation to milk more money from that sore teat cash cow?

An incident occurred with a friend and co-worker earlier in the week that hearkened me back musing about just how many times I have encountered the postal welfare phenomenon.  While stopping at a set of stop and hop style mailboxes along the sidewalk, an angry customer barged out of the house and accused my co-worker of hitting his car.  Our manager soon arrived to conduct an investigation, which revealed absolutely no damning marks on the LLV's bumper.  Since my own LLV bumper is colored by the yellows of caressed fire hydrants, the reds of kissed no parking posts, and the greens of fondled loading zone signs, combined together colorfully in a pallette worthy of Picasso, I know that brushing a passing butterfly is enough to paint that black rubber canvas. Therefore, I tend to believe my friend's version of events, especially since the deep gouge on the customer's car was much higher than the LLV bumper and ran vertically, not horizontally, as one would expect from an LLV swipe.

I can hear the wheels whirring in the customer's brain, thumping in time to the telltale straining and groaning engine noise of the approaching LLV.  His wife is on his case to fix that gouge on the bumper he got hitting a Lime Bike last week.  One of his 40 oz drinking homies told him about an accident his wife's sister's cousin had with a postal vehicle and how it's a sure payout.  So he wastes no time throwing a hoodie on over his prison tattoos and storming out to the mailbox to blame the letter carrier for the scrape on his SUV bumper, which can barely be discerned above the Raiders sticker and the deep scratches from other drunken follies.  Altogether his bumper looks like a NASA photo I saw of the fractured surface of one of Jupiter's moons.

I am pretty sure every American letter carrier, from old timers to those just shedding their CCA diapers, has had anywhere between one to half a dozen similar experiences.  I can only relate my own sundry stories from yonder years, all sharing a certain degree of similitude, differing only in the devil of the details.

I was a young thoroughbred racehorse, barely out of the starting block of my Postal career, when I made the mistake of steering my vehicle down a long driveway to deliver a package.  A customer popped out like a yapping Chihuahua to accuse me of hitting her garage door.  The ensuing investigation revealed that I was not at fault.  The lesson I took away from this is that I will hike a mile uphill through thorny scrub, rappel down a near vertical cliff face, or swim through Piranha-infested waters to deliver a package before I will near a customer's garage with my Postal vehicle again.

Much later on, only a few Christmases ago, the owner of a van driving by my parked and unoccupied postal vehicle accused me of hitting her.  She was insinuating, I suppose, that my LLV somehow lunged at hers with nobody behind the wheel, like in one of those Stephen King novels from his pre-rehab period.  The ensuing investigation revealed that I was not at fault.  The lesson I took away from this is that crazy will find you no matter how hard you try to hide, and that desperate people will try anything to make a buck.

The last experience my age-addled brain recalls did not involve a motor vehicle at all, but a lack of wheels won't stop a long-snouted lover of lucre once they have caught the scent of blood in the water. There is more than one way to skin a letter carrier, or to fleece an entire organization.

This hound dog hot on my trail was harrying me about a check, which they claimed I had lost.  The particulars of this case could fill an entire blog post, but suffice it to say that this "rhymes with witch" accused me of slapping her with the notice left slip I gave her with the 800 number snitch line. She stormed indigantly into the Post Office screaming out accusations of assault by paper cut.  Unfortunately for her, she recorded the entire incident on her phone, but her own video did not support her version of events.  The ensuing investigation revealed that I was not at fault.  My manager viewed the video, told the customer that she was harassing the carrier, and chased her out of the office with another losing postal lottery ticket.  I never saw or heard from her again.  The lesson I took away from this is that it is sometimes easier to stalk a stationary target than a moving one.

Of course, I understand that not all such encounters end agreeably for the letter carrier.  On a perfect postal planet, competent managers are able to sniff through several layers of petrified, putrified BS to arrive at the truth.  But few of our postal planets lie in the Goldilocks zone.  Most postal planets are uninhabitable for intelligent life forms.  So don't let babies play with matches, and don't let 204Bs play with accident kits.  The consequences of such can be fatal for letter carriers being stalked by unscrupulous LLV chasers looking for a jackpot.

Fortunately, these potentially fatal attractions ended well for me, and this time I guess all's well that ends well for my friend.  There were no long term deleritous effects, just a sticky, slimy residue of obscene greed that doesn't quite wash off the first time in the bath.

Amazon's First Rodeo

They have sullied your doorstep with their unsightly brown droppings.  Prime TV violates the sanctity of your regularly scheduled programs.  Alexa talks dirty to you.  The drone squadron buzzes overhead, taking reconnaissance photos of your front porch.  And now a delivery fleet of bronc busting rodeo cowboys - or clowns?  Confused? Read on, it gets worse.

By Mel Carriere

The new dynamic of modern mail delivery means sharing the mean, dog eat dog streets with people driving strange vehicles, some of them wearing some funky ash uniforms.  Gone are the comforting times of the big three - us vs the boys in brown what can they do for you and the blue and orange that will get your package there overnight no matter where in the world but can't get a man and his volleyball off an island in the South Pacific. One almost waxes nostalgic for those days. Those were serious postal competitors indeed, but normal parts of the suburban scenery.  Now they too are struggling for solvency against the upstarts on the block. 

Chief among these are Jeff Bezo's low paid henchmen, the cult of the big A, an amoeba-like monster that increasingly consumes everything you are about, from what arrives on your doorstep, what plays on your TV, what alluring, silky voiced robot voice babysits your child, and very soon what fleet of drones is that bombing your house.

Amazon's unstated but pretty obvious goal is to control every facet of your life by air, by land and by sea. Toward this end the company has taken measures to reduce and eventually eliminate having to pay anyone to move its products the "last mile," what we here in the Postal Service call "the green mile," because our indentured servitude to this corporate beast is killing us.  But even though Bezos and pals can ship their packages with the postal service at 75 percent below what it actually costs us to move those mountains of merchandise that arrive at your delivery unit whenever they feel like it, it is not enough.  The ultimate goal of Amazon is nothing less than to manufacture, sell and ship everything in America, correction, the world, without any barbaric outsiders soiling it with their non Bezos-blessed hands.

The latest word on these mean mail streets is that Amazon is planning to use livestock to distribute its inexhaustible inventory of clothes, furniture, very slightly used toilet paper and a few books here and there thrown in for nostalgia. That's right, you heard it here first, a genuine tsunami scoop, taken from a source directly inside the Amazon operation.

A few weeks ago I had my first encounter with one of these new rough riding Amazon operators who popped up without warning and stole my usual parking space with his cumbersome rented U-haul van.  My first impression was that this dude was stealing packages, not delivering them.  From his appearance, I couldn't help but get the idea that Amazon is not heavily vetting these delivery "pioneers," to paraphrase their employment sales pitch.  This cat was not some bustling dynamo parcel post pathfinder, in other words. Instead, he carried the rather jaded, distant, resigned air of a man who has spent long hours in enforced isolation.  His rather thick middle eastern accent indicated previous employment either as a cab driver, or maybe work release from Gitmo.

The apartments I was delivering to are gated.  Because this man had no access to the secret inner postal sanctum my arrow key provided, he asked if I would let him in so he could deliver his packages, which were not pilfered after all, probably.  I know he was the enemy, I know  he was the competition, I know I should have been a dick about it, but because I am pretty much a sucker for any sad sack sob story I opened the gate.  He then asked me directions to a couple of the addresses and I gave him that too.  I basically turned over the keys to the kingdom.  I should have just removed my sacred arrow key and handed it over.  I figured the guy was just trying to make a living.

The next day another Amazon deliverer showed up, in the same apartments, but this one didn't elicit quite as much sympathy on my part.  He was wearing a reflective vest, the kind you see on airport tarmacs, that barely covered his prison tattoos.  I admit I am drawing broad conclusions from a very limited sample size, but so far the common denominator behind these Amazon hired guns seemed to be the rather liberal application of the eau de incarceration scent. I didn't ask, but wondered why was he wearing a reflective vest in broad daylight?  The only plausible explanation was that his rental truck also contained a pair of runway marshalling wands that would be used to call down the drone fleet when Bezos gave the secret signal.

Somehow this second Amazon driver had already gotten past the fence, whether by pole vaulting, whether by file in a cake I don't know.  He had a small pile of parcels stacked by the NDCBU mailboxes, which he was scanning, evidently with the idea of doing the old dump and run, in other words leaving them on top of the postal receptacles.  Unlike the day before, this time I was not so accommodating  Those mailboxes are my turf.  

"You can't leave those packages there," I told him.

He looked up from his scanning with a surly expression, just like the time the warden told him to snuff out his cigarette.

"I know," he growled.  "This ain't my first rodeo."

Evidently this Bezos crony was a little Stir Crazy, and if you catch my drift your fondness for old prison rodeo movies makes me just a little uncomfortable.  Anyhow, the revelation from the delivery driver meant the Amazon rodeo and its accompanying contingent of clowns are in town, ready to ride and rope their way to your doorstep, saddled up on bucking bulls and broncos, putting on the spurs to get your prime purchase down the chute and into your corral by the most expedient means possible, including unbroken, non PETA approved hoofed mammals.

From a postal perspective, what does the presence of Amazon parcel slingers across the dusty cowtowns of America mean? Do we panic? Do we circle the wagons?  Do we believe the hoop and holler of our postmasters and managers wailing and rending their garments because they believe this Amazon parcel rustling will result in our biting the dust and being trampled underfoot?

Consider a Washington Examiner article reporting that the Postal Service loses $1.46 for every package delivered for Amazon. Trump got wind of this study and tweeted that Amazon is making the Postal Service poorer and dumber.  Maybe for once he's right.  Maybe this organization is so addicted to the sweet Amazon pipe dream that we can't see the reality of what it is doing to us.  Maybe we need some mail methadone to ease us off this debilitating dependence on Amazon as a cure all for our itching, leaking bottom line.

The Amazon rodeo has stirred up a big cloud of dust hiding the fact that parcels aren't going away.  I know this because, in addition to my annoying propensity to share my drunken rants via the medium of the blogosphere, I also am a statistics nerd.  This is a hobby that, while edifying to a handful of virginal, mother's-basement-dwelling math dweebs, makes it awful hard to get dates.  Since I don't get out much, I spend time compiling statistics for my route.  Therefore, I can tell you that before the Amazon decline, my route averaged 103 scans per day.

Guess what my scan average is since the recent abrupt cessation of the Amazon  stampede? You guessed it, my little buckaroos, 103.  Parcel volume went down slightly at first, but bounced back like a thrown bronc buster rebounding off one of those clown barrels.

What these numbers mean to me is that, while Bezos in his massive twenty or even 50 gallon hat might be trying his own round up of virtually everything, there are other postal customers out there, actual paying customers, that have moved in to fill that empty stall in our stable he recently vacated.

Maybe getting thrown like this, while embarrassing, was not such a great loss.  Perhaps it was time to cut our losses and cull the parcel herd.  Ride em cowboy.



Photo from The Cowboy Lifestyle Network

Package Confound, Dumbfound, Not Found

By Mel Carriere

Working for the Post Office for 24 years now I have seen so many strange managerial practices, ranging from eyebrow furrowing questionable to complete shaking my head "do I really gotta do that?" that one would think the limits of my protective cocoon of incredulity could not be stretched any further.  But now, with the implementation of the Loading feature on the Mobile Delivery Device (Scanner), I believe we have reached the apex of deliberately executed inefficiency, so that further striving toward maintaining our reputation as the organization most likely to shoot itself in the foot and like it is not going to bear fruit that smells any fouler than this.

Parcel loading times were evidently not long enough, so somebody in a postal think tank (servicing the toilet in stall #3 just off the boardroom at 475 L'Enfant Plaza), had a brainstorm that smelled more like a brain fart and pretty much cleared the room.  Why don't we, sayeth this seat warming sage of starry-eyed senselessness, create a system that adds an unnecessary extra step for experienced carriers who already know  how to line up their parcels and don't need directives from a soulless, schizoid robotic voice to tell them what imaginary quadrant to toss a package into, while at the same time, as an added bonus, utterly confuses the diapers right off the newbies who have never carried that route before, making sure they will waste time they don't have, but we like to pretend they do, crawling through a tangled mess of haphazardly thrown parcels in the back of the LLV and frequently backtracking.

If the objective here was to create a system to assist the bewildered CCA to sidestep the time consuming parcel numbering process I could understand.  Except: 1) the underlying architecture of the plan is faulty, 2) whatever algorithm divies up the packages into their respective "zones" does not do so equitably and 3) the technology does not appear to have been tested, evidenced by the fact that it doesn't work in real life, only in postal fairyland.

1) - Architecture. Lincoln said that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and an adjunct of this timeless truth is that parcels divided against themselves cannot stand, but will certainly fall, tumbling over into zones where they do not belong, creating a great deal of avoidable backtracking and foul epitaphs that will make your granny's sainted ears melt.  

In other words, the load feature creates six imaginary zones, as much a figment of your imagination as the first down marker that you plainly see on your TV but the running back of your favorite team obviously cannot as he tumbles to earth three inches shy of it, bringing on the punting unit again.  Postal punting is painful.  I just said that because it sounded alliterative, not because it has any bearing on the conversation.  Anyhow, the point is that there are no physical barriers separating these zones, and as John Cougar said almost as famously as Lincoln, the walls keep tumbling down, causing zone 6 to bleed into zone 4 and 5, and even a lonely stray from zone 1 showing up at the bottom of zone 6 fifteen minutes short of quitting time, evoking much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

2) - Bad algorithm blues.  Another famous stone head of Mt Rushmore wrote that all men are created equal, but load feature zones were not created with any of these egalitarian principles in mind, because the distribution of parcels among the various zones appears to have been doled out as if a loaded dice is landing on the number six over and over again.  My route has over 900 deliveries, and about the last 400 fall into zone 6.  These last 400 deliveries require 32 starts and stops of the vehicle.  The load feature does not seem to recognize the importance of having my parcel ducks lined up in a row, which is to limit package mining through a teetering, untidy mass, a process that almost inevitably leads to a deadly cave in and corresponding foul language that is wasted because no one can hear you curse from the bottom of the parcel avalanche. Especially not your grandmother, whose unblemished eardrums were already fried in step one. Repeat process 31 more times.  Furthermore, this behemoth zone that has been gerrymandered into Leviathan status by the scanner's secret software system towers like the Himalayas over Death Valley's Badwater Basin, creating an enormous ripple in the space time continuum, an event horizon over which parcels tumble and disappear, only to reappear later at unexpected times and inconvenient places.

3) - Twisted Technology.  Another man who failed to make the cut for Rushmore, but got honorable mention on the hundred dollar bill and also, quite appropriately, was appointed first Postmaster General, once said that "The bitterness of low quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten." 

Not too many Benjamins were spent on this Load Feature project, I believe.  One gets the feeling it was conceptualized on a bar napkin over the course of a drunken weekend, then rolled out still hungover on Monday.  My basis for this assertion is the persistent prevalence of the "package not found" error message. Instead of spitting out a zone like it is supposed to in these situations, the scanner insists that it can not find the package, leading to a lot of pointless metaphysical speculation.  Packages imprint upon letter carriers like orphaned baby ducks.  They are definitely there, we can see them, we can hear them quack, but the scanner insists they are not there at all, not just once in a while but repeatedly.

The first time I used the Load Feature (not by choice), I was left with a half dozen not found, I suppose you could call them orphaned milk carton packages, that I smugly and self-righteously ran back to the clerk's, thinking I would bash their little function four skulls in with them for having missed arrival at unit scans.  This would have been very satisfying and a lot of fun, but every single one of the not found packages turned out to have an arrival at unit, and no one had a clue why they were showing up as "not found."

Everybody is still clueless.  The system still sucks.  I have to ask what good is this L feature to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses of CCAs if they still have to haul back several not found packages into the office to write relay numbers on, even though they (the packages not CCAs) are hiding like an elephant playing peek-a-boo behind a flagpole?

And how does a letter carrier, CCA or regular alike, respond to this pimpled prom date of a poorly planned, shoddily executed parcel loading system?  Do we fight to fix it or silently accept it?  Do we dissent or consent? Do we acquiesce to cluelessness?

In postal land we know we get paid to do stupid stuff, so we will pretend to be wise in going along with the program, even though we are really just too numb to care. An English bard, obviously married, who certainly would have his face chiseled into Rushmore had he lived in Virginia or Illinois instead of Stratford upon Avon, admonishes us in closing with these words of wisdom from Richard III - "Dispute not with her she is lunatic."