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.
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