Scanner Backlash - 50 Foot Fetish

By Mel Carriere

I completely understand that managing this postal behemoth is like what one half of pickin' and a grinnin' Buck Owens said is like trying to grab a tiger by the tail, but sometimes our beloved Postal brain trust invests a lot of effort on projects that fizzle out into nothingness. If I didn't know better, I might say that someone upstairs in a padded cubicle has to justify their paycheck by inventing knee jerk solutions to problems beyond anyone's control - Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

I don't think the Post Office has a monopoly on the term "flavor of the month," but that is what such schemes amount to, here today and gone tomorrow, when even the most devoted members of the Kool-aid drinking cult realize you can't make ignore reality forever.

One such reappearing flavor of the month has the fancy name "arterial collections" attached to it. This is a process whereby the windmill tilters make us drive across the Zip Code to deposit our outgoing letters in the closest collection box by noon. Collection boxes are as scarce as bigfoot sightings these days, meaning many routes have to drive a long way to drop off what usually amounts to not more than a dozen letters. The effort becomes increasingly tedious and time consuming for everybody, with so little payoff that management stops enforcement and it dies an unofficial death. Nevertheless, this fool's errand remains such a popular pie in the sky that they bring it back every year, like the McRib.

Another such exercise in futility still leaves its bitter fruit hanging on the walls of our post office, a couple years after it died on the vine. I can't remember the impetus behind the plan, but I imagine some CCA not carrying his satchel on Sunday delivery was bitten by a dog as he bounced out of the LLV sans bullfighter cape. Now, I agree that dog bites are a serious problem that has to be addressed, and I also agree that, where dogs and letter carriers are concerned, being without a satchel is like Popeye being without spinach. All the same, I think the think tank that responded to this problem started with a horse and turned into a multi-headed, tentacled beast on the drawing board, taking something simple and making it so cumbersome that everybody immediately started looking for work-arounds.

In response to the problem, instead of ensuring that all CCAs carried their satchels with them on Amazon Sunday, they had maintenance in our local post offices install hooks, on which five brand spanking new satchels were hung by the time clock with care, in hopes that some mail-humping St. Nick would not steal them.

These new satchels were supposed to be for CCA Sunday use exclusively, but naturally they were looked upon with covetous eyes by letter carriers with high mileage mail bags. Eventually all the fresh from the showroom satchels disappeared, replaced with a couple decrepit trade-ins as if no one would notice. These are still hanging there, looking like the bleached bones of a gooney bird that could never get its gangly legs off the runway.

This brings me up to date with the latest flavor of the month, this one having postal supervisors going around with clipboards filled with dubious scanner data every morning, which is used to harass letter carriers who supposedly back too far. Instead of the far more entertaining mile-high club, let's call these backsliders the fifty-foot club.

Although so far I have not been personally accused of a prolonged retrograde motion, I am notorious for not keeping my nose, or rather my ears, tuned into my own business. I can't control this eavesdropping habit of mine. Even though my ears are clogged with wax so thick it defies the penetration of any instrument known to medical science, I can feel the vibrations of distant conversations through this gooey layer, then my brain translates them into verbal messages. In the Navy, before my eardrums were encumbered by their current soundproof shellac, my hearing tester told me I could hear a bird pissing in the wind. I don't make a conscious effort to butt into my neighbors' business, it just happens.

So it was that while our manager was making the rounds with her clipboard that doubles as a spanking paddle, I overheard her asking a CCA why he backed fifty feet. The Big Brother is watching you scanner had tattled on him. You start to get comfortable paling around with this little blue beast, its constant presence making you feel a little less lonely, even talking dirty to you sometimes to fill the silence, then you find out at times like these it is really a two-timing back-stabbing bitch.

Fifty feet is approximately 3 1/2 LLV lengths, a long way. There is a taxi driver in India who only drives backwards, at speeds up to 50 mph, but other than him most drivers feel comfortable steering with eyes forward, not over the shoulder. Okay, I'm thinking, this is a little extreme - this CCA being in such a hurry he won't even stop to orient his LLV bow forward.

At this point I'm a little smugly self righteous. Ha ha, I would never do something so deliberately dangerous as back 50 feet, I'm thinking. I don't claim to be the Postal Service's best driver, they'll never call me Million Mile Mel, but I at least try to minimize the mayhem I can cause in a postal vehicle.

Then my meddlesome ears tuned in as she walked to another carrier, clipboard in striking position. Different carrier, same story. This one backed fifty feet too.

Now my reaction is that this defies coincidence. Two different carriers each backing the exact distance, as if they had dismounted from the LLV with a tape measure and marked off 50 feet exactly, like it's a cult consisting of bad drivers that have to back 50 feet by some bizarre religious mandate, such as praying 50 beads on a rosary.

Although I had my questions, my manager appeared unruffled by the unlikely appearance of the number 50 on her form, two times in a row. So let's fast forward to the next day, when she ventured forth to swat another ugly insect with her clipboard flyswatter, this one being a friend of mine. With a completely straight face, she accused him of this same fifty foot faux pas.

At this point the alarm on my bullshit detector is wailing like an air raid horn. 50 feet three straight times. They will never call me Mel the Mathematician, but that has to be statistically impossible.

My manager remained completely oblivious to this statistical improbability. Then again, she shoots craps every day in seedy back alleys with DOIS-loaded dice, rolling sevens every time. But as for me, I was skeptical.

Why not 55, or 46, or 39 feet, I wondered. The answer, it occured to me, is that these scanners are not too precise at all in their estimation of distances. I frequently get sampling requests half a block away from a house, or even for the next block over. So with this imprecision programmed into management's new flavor of the month toy, you might back 5 feet, or 10 feet, or even 74 feet in a forward-shunning fugue, but the scanner will report that you went fifty feet. Fifty feet on the dot.

My friend, meanwhile, was completely confused about being hung from a fifty foot rope. He could not recall having backed fifty feet at the time and place pinpointed by the scanner, or ever having backed fifty feet, in a postal vehicle or otherwise. If he had any hair to begin with he would have scratched his head bald, but as it was he carved some deep pink fingernail gouges into the treeless plain of his scalp, wondering what happened.

Then he remembered that on that fateful fifty-foot day he had parked at that reported location, then got out and walked backwards across the street to deliver a package. I mean, he didn't actually walk backwards, that would look silly and probably be a little hazardous, but he moved in a direction opposite to his forward line of travel. His scanner,of course, remained on his person, and that blind blue floozy, its snooping eye buried in the depths of his pocket, thought she was being taken for a ride and blew the whistle.

If I really thought there was anything moral about the way the Postal Service goes about its business, I would say that the moral of this story is that this technology is not perfect, and maybe we shouldn't hold people accountable for hazardous acts until they have worked out the bugs. If headquarters wants to install GPS devices on Postal vehicles, which they will undoubtedly do in the future, then this fifty foot fixation might be more accurate, but in the meantime, the report remains a fifty foot fable. They expect us to keep the scanner with us at all times, even when we go to the bathroom for crying out loud, so these fifty foot false positives are going to be a daily occurrence, until somebody figures out it is just a waste of time, barking up the wrong fifty foot tree.

Which might explain the bad smell in the room. Could it have been just another fifty foot fart, falsely echoing back to that flavor of the month facility, where further fake fairy-tails are being formulated, even as we speak?

Mel's Memo to Postal Service - Don't Hire Any More Men

By Mel Carriere

There I was, keeping my finger on the Postal Service's somewhat feeble, irregular pulse, my job as your commentator/blogger of all things postal - when I stumbled across, or should I say damn near stepped into this steaming pile.  Yes - unbelievably disgusting as it is, somewhere in Ohio a mailman got caught dropping his drawers and emptying his bowels by some kid's swing set, and I can't say I'm surprised.

Must have been a slow news day in Cincinnati, the town where it was my childhood ambition to join Les Nessman doing the pork report at good old WKRP, but broadcast journalism in southern Ohio is not always the glamour depicted on that 70s sitcom.  For instance, imagine being cub reporter Ken Brown here, trying to climb the ladder of news reporting, and you get stuck doing poop patrol.  Then again, these days, letter carriers getting caught in the act seems to be pretty big news, sometimes even preempting congressional investigations, mass shootings, and natural disasters.  Us getting caught with our figurative and literal pants down gives the public a certain self-satisfied thrill.  See honey I told you.  Look at what those overpaid civil servants are doing on our nickel.

But this time, as my cyberfoot nearly splattered in this stool stack, Miami Steamer, Cleveland hot waffle, Freddy fazbear pizza, Wisconsin floor buffer, Lake Erie logjam, whatever you want to call it because there are thousands of synonyms (as I discovered to my great mirth on urban thesaurus) - rather than being filled with righteous indignation as I usually am - Oh the inhumanity!, instead it occurred to me that it is always male letter carriers who get caught committing outrageous, disgusting, illegal, frequently immoral acts on the clock.  Which leads me to the conclusion that our beloved sister Mail Ladies in blue either don't do these things, or they are smart enough not to get caught.

For instance, have you ever seen a caught in the act video of a female letter carrier chucking a package clearly marked Fragile over a ten foot high fence?  No, women are more concerned about the ethical dilemma of the thing, or else they are more afraid of getting in trouble, or else their keen forensic scientist eyes that instantly know when one tiny spoon is out of place in the kitchen have already spotted the hidden camera that knucklehead Joe Schmoe mailman failed to see. For one or all of these reasons, our girls of the satchel will drive a mile down an alley and up a hill to deliver the package intact, whereas we all know Joe Schmoe just wants to get the job done, so he says screw it it's not mine and gives it the old heave-ho.

Another aspect of daily carrier life that segregates the sexes involves the alleged abuse of animals.  Women think dogs are their babies, they carry them around in handbags in supermarkets, much to the chagrin of us husky towers of testosterone, who hate getting yapped at when we're trying to remember which kind of chicken broth Momma told us to bring home, where we keep our own uncultured curs rolling around happily in the backyard mud.

Whether this cruelty caught on camera is real or simply self-defense is beyond the scope of this blog, but has been the subject of others, so often that it raises a collective yawn among most readers, who don't like a good story watered down with the truth.  In any case, it always seems to be a male mailman caught kicking, pepper-spraying, possibly just injuring the delicate psyches of little yipping furr-balls by yelling obscenities at them.  Female letter carriers, on the other hand, who perhaps lack the hormone-fueled obsession to prove who's the boss, who's your Daddy, etc, wisely avoid confrontations, or perhaps again possess some innate, exclusively female sixth sense that can sniff out electronic vigilance.  It could be they really are emptying Exxon-Valdez size tankers of pepper spray into the naked eyeballs of pooches everyday, but they avoid getting recorded doing it.

This leads us to the most recent flagrant, scandalous, nose-turning, stomach-churning violation of postal decorum, this Ohio carrier caught dropping an extra, unscanned package by some tyke's playground equipment, which I suppose would be option 6, garage or other, if and when a barcode becomes available, which I understand is currently in development at Postal Proving Grounds in a secret, unventilated bunker deep beneath 1 L'enfant Plaza.

Let's face it, women don't commit this kind of outrage because they are more discrete about their bodily functions.  A man will drop a load in just about any hole in the ground, or dump one out in the open under the blue sky, just like livestock, if no pit or hollow is immediately available.  Women, however, are even picky about using designated facilities equipped with plumbing and running water.  As proof, on a recent road trip my own darling but constipated wife held it for six days, not willing to expose her delicate derriere to potential slimy microbes lurking unseen on the toilet seats of rest stops, fast food joints, or hotel rooms.  Women can do this, because they possess an extra excretory organ that allows them to convert their waste to powder form, like Tang or Instant Breakfast, until it can be mixed with water and safely disposed of.  Men, on the other hand, are like frightened birds who immediately empty their bowels before flying from the first sign of trouble.

Isn't it always one of our Postal Mother Hens at morning stand-up talks, holding up a Gatorade bottle left in her vehicle that is filled with some yellowish fluid that is probably not lemon flavor, because the receptacle clearly says "Fruit Punch."  As she rants and raves about how utterly disgusting, not to mention indecent this is, she is not looking toward the women, standing out as spotless pillars of virtue in their unstained, neatly pressed uniforms, but over in the dunce corner where the wrinkled, soiled, unpolished bad boys hang out, lowering their heads shamefully with a wasn't me look, even though we know it could have been any one of them, at one time or another.

Men are pigs, is what I'm getting at, but unlike swine they are not particularly bright.  The reason why the male penitentiaries are overcrowded is because men make lousy criminals.  They don't know how to cover their tracks or clean up their DNA, so they get caught every time.

Therefore, this  revolting act in Ohio leads me to propose that from here on out, the Postal Service only hire women.  The public perception of the organization would immediately improve and there would be no more embarrassing caught in the act incidents that ruin digestion for masses of Americans watching the News during the evening meal.  Productivity would also go up and profits would return, because while we gorillas are mostly bragging and chest-thumping, the ladies are going about their jobs with quiet diligence and efficiency.

Of course, the Post Office might want to keep a few of us around, because we men can be cute and funny, and the workplace would be downright boring without us. Any other zoo besides the PO, ya gotta pay admission to watch the apes.

The only place where I can't identify any differences between men and women in the postal workplace is driving.  I don't have any statistics to back me up, but I am sure men and women are involved in motor vehicle accidents on an equal basis.  Just yesterday, for instance, I nearly hit some lady who swung across three or four lanes to make a right turn in front of me.  Dem bitches be driving crazy.

Postal Tsunami Musical Guest - Fine Young Cannibals "You drive me crazy."

Image courtesy of Fox 19 in Cinncinnati, Ohio