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