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
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
