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