A month and a half ago, I published an article on Hub Pages relating the events that prompted me to disavow dark side 204B life and return to righteous living as a letter carrier.
My story was well received, taking in a lot of views. Like a horror movie, people get a visceral thrill looking behind the curtains of a secret torture chamber where they would never set foot, but still can't resist a voyeuristic peek into. I thank you all for reading.
After I shared the post on Facebook, most of the feedback was favorable, meaning that people were entertained or informed without making value judgments about the author. But there was also an undercurrent of hostility also, which I kind of expected. A certain percentage of letter carriers extends no tolerance or forgiveness to anybody who has ever dabbled in the arcane magic that is postal supervision. In the opinion of this small but vocal minority, all 204Bs past, present and future should be strung up, drawn and quartered, and roasted on a spit, not picking one of the three as punishment for this mortal sin, but doing all of them in order, starting with the most painful.
Here is an example of the outrage expressed:
"The truth? You're one or the other. Make your choice, stick with it, and don't try to justify the things you do to the one's you have done it to. No one feels sorry for you. No one cares. Own who you are."
What can I say to assuage the offended feelings of this individual, or anybody else, who despises me for once being a 204B? Probably nothing. No amount of chest pounding mea culpa, self-flaggelation, wearing of the hair shirt, rolling around in sackcloth and ashes, would change this or any other similarly-opinioned person's perception.
So I'm not even going to try. I actually did write a long harangue to respond, then decided to scrap it. This blog is about letter carrier life in all of its facets, it is not a crying-hanky platform to defend my hurt feelings. Instead, I will pose the following question:
Are all Postal supervisors created evil?
We all know some good ones and some bad ones, some smart ones and some dumb ones, some stressed out and some laid back ones.
There are those who get into it for the right reasons, because they sincerely want to change things for the better. There are those who do it because they couldn't handle working for a living in craft (Note: these seem to be the managers who rise highest up the ranks). Then there are a few who got pressured into the job by spouses who got tired of washing their sweat-soaked uniforms.
To me, supervisors are not automatically born with the mark of the beast stamped upon their foreheads, or with devil horns. Sometimes they start off good but their position of power, however pathetic that power may be, goes to their heads. Even the meekest mouse of a man can become authoritative in such a role. Still others revel in the power from the beginning and become consumed by it. Finally, a significant portion manage to retain their humanity through the constant floggings from above.
My conclusion? Postal supervisors are not one size fits all. I don't think they are necessarily created evil. I believe they are a regular cross section of humanity within a normal standard deviation, containing good apples and bad apples who somehow got stuck in a superheated forge in which a few melted beyond recognition, others pulled their nuts out of the fire before it was too late, and still more learned to become pretty handy with a pitchfork, both on the giving and receiving ends.
Good Cop / Bad Cop Supervisors (Bonus Thoughts!)
This next part is only marginally related to the above theme. Still, it is close enough that I don't think it merits its own blog post, because it serves to demonstrate how management takes advantage of different supervisor personality types to enforce its insidious agenda. A prime example is what I call the good cop / bad cop routine.
Good cop / bad cop is a real interrogation technique, included in the training manuals of Federal agents. I know this, I am not making it up, because a friend of mine managed to get a copy of one. Now, I am not saying they send postal supervisors to torture training, though that lady quoted above, the one who accused me of all sorts of high crimes and misdemeanors, would probably say they do.
In Good Cop / Bad Cop the really mean, nasty, fire-breathing SOB bad cop enters the interrogation room first to verbally abuse, then threaten to beat the bejesus out of the poor guy in the hot seat unless he cooperates. After this they let the interrogee simmer in his juices a while, worrying all the time if Bad Cop is coming back. Next they send in Good Cop, who is just the opposite of Bad Cop. Being a super chill dude, he goes to the poor sucker handcuffed to the table with a lamp pointed in his face, possibly electrodes taped to his family bling, gives him a cigarette, tells him everything will be all right, nobody is going to hurt him. They rotate through the Good Cop / Bad Cop cycle a few times. Then at last Good Cop complains that if he doesn't come up with something soon they are going to kick him off the case, leaving the suspect squirming in the chair to the not so tender mercies of Bad Cop alone. The interrogee is so afraid of Bad Cop coming back he confesses everything to Good Cop.
This week, they tried a variation of this technique in my office. We have a Good Cop and a Bad Cop Supervisor in house, but Bad Cop isn't smart enough, Good Cop isn't devious enough, neither one communicates to the other anyway, so they don't give me the impression they planned it on purpose. I think rather that they stumbled across the scheme by accident, but I could be wrong.
Anyhow, on Tuesday Bad Cop informed us in the morning stand up talk that Good Cop was in trouble. On Tuesday he had to go to the postmaster's office and give account for his sins, to explain why he had so many carriers out past 1800 on Monday. Of course it was his fault, it had nothing to do with the mail volume, the available manpower, or any other circumstances out of his control.
Naturally we all felt bad for Good Cop, because he treats us with respect and doesn't hold us to unreasonable expectations. He also works really hard and does his best to get us the things we need to do our jobs properly, like changing out broken CBUs and parcel lockers. When most of your requests to management fall on deaf ears, you appreciate a guy like that. To a point.
But Bad Cop was really laying the guilt trip on us about Good Cop, insinuating that if only if we had behaved better Good Cop wouldn't be lugging his cross up the hill to Calvary right now, sneakily implying that if we wanted to keep Good Cop around in the future we better get our act together.
Maybe as a younger, more naive letter carrier I would have been stirred emotionally by Bad Cop's plea into doing whatever it takes to help out poor Good Cop, like cutting a break here and there, or even giving up that most sacred interval of my day, my half hour lunch break. But now I'm older, considerably jaded, and cynical as hell. Furthermore, having sat in that hot seat myself and escaped with my soul more or less intact, it is hard to sympathize with people who willfully continue to subject themselves to it, like an abused spouse who keeps going back to take more beatings.
Therefore, in lieu of my reluctance to work myself to a complete frazzle for Good Cop, I will offer him some advice instead:
If you can't take the heat stay out of the kitchen.
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
No, not all supervisors are created evil, some have evil thrust upon them, but I'll be damned if I'm going to follow them down that narrow road to hell. Good cop, bad cop, I cop out.
Footnote: Good Cop later confessed to me that he wasn't singled out for punishment with the postmaster, but that the subject of 1800 carriers was just one of many topics addressed at a supervisor's meeting.
Postal Tsunami Musical Guest: George Thorogood Bad to The Bone
Image from Pixabay.
