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?