Slow Motion, Eye Rolling Stand-up Talks

By Mel Carriere

Have you ever been in a situation so inescapably dull that you think time is standing still, or even going backwards, as if the person or people responsible for locking you in some dismal, inescapable vortex that makes you feel as futile as that spider trying to swim out of the whirlpool in your draining bathroom sink had somehow sucked you into a space-time wormhole where history endlessly repeats itself?

Okay, stop and take a breath from that exhausting run-on sentence.  Already you're thinking I'm trying to mystify you with poetic hyperbole, and while that may be partially true, the paragraph above is exactly what the stand up talks in our post office have become.

You call them service talks, I call them stand up talks.  Shakespeare said that a pile of steaming dog turds with your foot in it by any other name would stink just as bad.  The only difference between them is the term you use in whatever postal dialect you speak in Upstate New York, or out there on the dead armadillo strewn Oklahoma panhandle. 

Wherever you may work across this great Postal nation, the content of these long-winded harangues, however, is essentially the same.  Those of us who grew up in the 70s remember watching reruns of the same tired cop shows over and over again, because - and brace yourself children, we didn't have Netflix to switch to, and we couldn't even pop in a DVD.  Postal stand up talks are something like that - an endless loop of Gilligan's Island reruns with no Ginger or Mary Ann for eye candy.

When you have a narcissistic station manager who likes to hear herself talk, even though she really doesn't speak English, it makes the stand up talks even more insufferable.  This lady insists on giving a daily stand up talk, simply because "That's my style," she says. 

Problem is, there are only so many ways you can repeat the same lie before people catch on that you think they're stupid and you're trying to pull a fast one.  "The mail is light," for instance, means the same thing as "volume is low," which means the same thing as "total deliverable pieces is under reference."  They're all the same fib, and it's even worse when you can't pronounce the falsehood within the standards of accepted English usage.

Yet once the station manager provides a soapbox, it creates a mind-numbing chain reaction down the row of stupidity dominoes.  It seems there are always one or two blowhards in every station equally in love with what they see in their own cracked mirrors every day, and these folks will readily avail themselves of the opportunity to see who can ask the stupidest question.

If a dumb question does not immediately come to mind, rest assured that the determined postal stand up talk blowhard will find a way to speak, nonetheless, often by rearranging or paraphrasing the words of the preceding speaker.  "Let me reiterate on what he said," or "I want to jump in on what she said, " or my personal favorite, "allow me to piggyback on what they just said."

The word piggyback has become the most overused term in the dictionary of Postal English, which was not written by me or my station manager,who does not speak English.  I've said that before, but I thought I would reiterate, or jump in, or piggyback on that thought, since everybody else is.

My frustration with the recycled, rehashed, repeated postal stand up talk has grown to the point where I will ask you politely never to use the word piggyback in my presence, unless you are a cute chick in a bikini who wants to start up a chicken fight in the swimming pool.

Before you know it, with all the jumping in and piggybacking going on, a five minute stand up talk has turned into 15 or 20 minutes. Meanwhile, surprise surprise, the mail has not been casing or delivering itself.  But if you try to use a long stand up talk as a justification for overtime your supervisor looks at you like you're speaking Swahili.

I understand that stand up talks, or service talks, or whatever other nifty name you want to put on this compost heap of regurgitated information, are sometimes important.  I just wish that every once in a while somebody would have something new and fresh, perhaps even interesting to say.  

But in the meantime, as the meme says, I just rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain. 


Photo of Mel's flooded route by Mel Carriere, who is not a photographer and will never be one.

Mel's latest Postal Customers from Hell, on Hub Pages

Not even El Nino can slow down the irrepressible coastal wrecking capabilities of the tsunami.  To show your appreciation for the literary mayhem we cause here through the constant use of run on sentences, dangling modifiers, and other things your High School English teacher would never approve of, please click on our fine ads.  

Mel's Disappointing EXFC First Class Mail Test - Whatever Happened to Overnight Delivery?

By Mel Carriere

It was a grueling holiday season but guess what - we made it happen!  The scuttlebutt around the office is that Amazon is giving us a lot of extra FedEx and UPS business as a result of our stellar Christmas performance, so the fun continues!  Parcels remain abundant even as the holidays have wound down.  Anyhow, I am sorry for neglecting my blog, but with long hours and no days off it is sometimes hard to write.  Pathetic excuses aside, I proceed with the Postal Tsunami's first offering for 2016, which I hope will be a great year for you and I both.

I haven't been secretive about the fact that I was in management for a while, four years of that spent on a detail assignment that had nothing to do with beating up letter carriers.  When I did decide to try the 204B thing, it was only on an experimental basis, and I did it based on the misguided assumption that I could make a difference for the better.  Because crappy people of limited intelligence taking supervisory positions is the cause of the whole lousy labor/management relationship, I thought that maybe if I did it I could make a difference for the better.  I felt a sense of duty to use my talents to help change the situation.  But then I discovered that management didn't care about my theoretical intelligence, or about anybody fixing a broken system.  They just wanted a butt that could fill a seat without complaining too much, and somebody they could place the blame on when necessary.  The situation was hopeless, so I abandoned ship in an inflatable life raft before my soul could sink into complete oblivion.

True confessions aside, I'll get on with the story.  When I was on a detail assignment back in those days, one of the things our office did was damage control whenever a zero bundle was reported.  For those of you who are unaware of the Postal Service's once vital, but now woefully neglected EXFC system, I will give you a little primer on it, to the extent of my own spotty knowledge of how the process really works.  From what I understand, our auditing company Price-Waterhouse places bundles of mail into collection boxes, then measures what percentage of these letters arrive overnight in a certain local delivery territory, usually comprising a metropolitan area.  When none of these letters arrive overnight it is called a zero bundle, and it sets off deafening alarms in the Operations Department.  Not actual audible alarms with flashing red lights, but the effect is exactly the same.  People scramble for battle stations, and an immediate investigation is launched to see who is responsible.  The culprit is usually a letter carrier who didn't pick up a collection box, or a manager who didn't assign a letter carrier to pick up a collection box.  Of course the manager will always s**t on some letter carrier and say so and so was supposed to do it but didn't.  I have heard, although have never seen it for myself, that sometimes a manager has a copy of the collection box scan in his desk and, when in a pinch, will scan it without actually having anybody check the box.  This trick has probably changed since we got GPS on the new scanners.  Whatever the case, a letter carrier will almost always get blamed and the manager will get a promotion for being resourceful.  You know how it goes.

EXFC used to be very important in general, and zero bundles in particular had to be avoided like an Ebola victim bleeding out in your bathtub.  I know that's a horribly vivid comparison, but it's the most appropriate one I could think of on short notice.  The times they are a changin' since the downgrading of first class mail that took place last year, however, and as proof I offer up my own recent EXFC experiment, which I dejectedly report resulted in another zero bundle.  It didn't set off any virtual alarms in any virtual Operations Departments, but it does demonstrate how crappy first class mail has now become, for lack of a better technical term.

Early last week I finally got around to finishing the Christmas thank you notes for customers who were thoughtful towards me during the holiday season.  Wednesday morning I put 20 stamped thank-yous in the outgoing mail slot of my neighborhood CBU.  On Thursday I went to work anticipating that I would be delivering at least most of them on my route as I made my rounds.  I work about eleven miles from where I work, so it should have been an EXFC slam dunk.  Instead, my letters laid a big goose egg, a huge zero bundle with a capital Z.  None of them came in on Thursday.  Not a single sad and lonely little thank you note came trickling down the first class pipeline.  

I found this strange and disappointing, because in Xmas 2014 every last one of them arrived overnight.   Patiently I waited for Friday, thinking that maybe the regular was off on Thursday and had failed to check the outgoing mail.  That would be a poor excuse for a lack of overnight performance, but better than accepting the horrible reality that our first class mail standards are now abysmally inadequate; incapable of serving the American Public as we are sanctioned to do.

Still nothing on Friday.  Snail-Mail was no longer a mostly jokingly used metaphor, it was the literal truth.  I had visions of sluggish gastropods painstakingly lugging my little thank you notes down from the plant with agonizing slowness, little blue eagles painted on the sides of their curvy shells.

Saturday I was pleased to discover that my thank-you notes had not been lost in the mail.  They finally oozed down their slimy path to our Post Office; or at least 19 of them did.  One is still missing, perhaps not having been unloaded from the curled cargo compartment of some particularly lethargic slug-related invertebrate.  That thank you note is still in transit, and since today is a holiday, won't get there until tomorrow (hopefully), 6 days after my eager fingers first deposited it in the outgoing mail.

6 days used to be considered bad performance for a letter to traverse the country, much less eleven miles in a city crisscrossed by ample, open freeways, and prowled by stressed out delivery employees who regularly exceed the speed limit.

I did notice that the postmarks on my overdue thank-you notes said January 14th.  That could mean that somebody did fail to pick them up on the 13th, the day I deposited them.  Even so, they still should have rolled in on the 15th, at least most of them.  Instead, they got trapped somewhere in the postal drain between Chula Vista and San Diego - a nasty first class sinkhole as clogged as the still broken toilet in our men's restroom (another blog, another time), and they didn't drip in until the 16th.

Meanwhile, sometimes Amazon packages don't show up until 11 AM, and they still have to be sorted by the clerks and delivered by the carriers.  I've done that topic to death, so I'll let it rest, leaving you with the concept of "skewed priorities" to chew on today, as you grow old by your mailbox waiting for your delayed W-2s to roll in.  Happy belated New Year from the Tsunami!



The above image, which is not me but very well could be, comes from: https://theycallmejane.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/snail-mail-it-does-a-heart-good/


The Postal Tsunami is a very sluggish literary engine itself, and needs money to feed its snail authors, who type so slow they create a time vortex on the newsroom floor.  Please kindly click on the ads that interest you.  They don't bite, they won't break your computer or phone, and they don't ooze any noxious snail fluids.  Thanks for your cooperation and support.

Cute Things Postal Managers Say (Or Spew?)

By Mel Carriere

I haven't been writing a lot on the Tsunami lately for a few reasons; some personal, some logistical, some having to do with getting my butt kicked by the November mail flow.   

The November mail flow is like a Tsunami in and of itself.  It washes in a lot of unexpected debris from parts unknown - stuff that, while mildly shocking at the moment, doesn't really surprise you because at this point in your Postal career, if your Postal career is longer than a year or so, you've probably seen everything.

One of the things that washed up this November in our office was a new station manager.  She actually has been our station manager for a few years on paper, but never reported for duty, probably because our backwater, out of the way office is somewhat of a career killer for aspiring bigshots.  I think she must have gotten in trouble somewhere and finally had to lower herself, because I've never heard anybody use the word  "respect" so many times in the same sentence.  When she first started she was just full of love and the "utmost respect" for everybody.

That romantic ardor is cooling off now.  She is finally learning why nobody wants to manage our office, why our place is only a temporary way station for managers on their way up or their way out, and this is taking its toll after only a couple of weeks.  The cracks are showing.  Any day now she is only to explode in a messy splatter of something other than the utmost respect.

This new manager has convinced me that lying shamelessly is an actual, premeditated management strategy that just might work in a lot of places.  Of course, it doesn't work in our station because we have too many cynical, broken down, battle hardened old farts, like me, which is another reason nobody wants to supervise us.  You just can't lie and expect us to believe it, because we've heard all the lies before.  We don't get mad when people lie to us, we just shake our heads and patiently endure it, like it is something nasty but cute and funny at the same time, like when a baby spits up on you.  You just smile, say "awww," pass the baby back to its Mama then go for a towel to clean yourself up; to get that nasty goo off of you before it dries.

Every morning this new station manager gives us a stand up talk, because "that's my style," so she says.  During the stand up talk she tells us pretty much the same lies.  I thought I would share a short list of some of these cute, colorful things she says:

There's no mail today: Of course, this lie is promulgated and perpetuated throughout every post office, everywhere, so nothing new.  What amazes me, without really amazing me, is that managers have the audacity to say this when anybody legally licensed to drive can see there are dangerously leaning towers of 775 tubs stuffed with presort flats piled at our cases, along with holiday parcels stacked to the ceiling.

The parcels are finished:  I have to give this new manager credit for putting an interesting new spin on lying, and going to great, creative lengths to make these lies seem like the truth.  She actually has instructed the clerks to ring the bell for parcel completion when only the big packages have been distributed, giving carriers the false impression that we have all our mail going out the door.  Of course, what this fibbing little bell isn't saying is that untold hundreds of SPRs still have to be sorted, and these won't be "finalized" until 12:30, meaning we will all have to drive back to the post office in the afternoon, then backtrack a couple dozen little guys. 

The DPS is half of what it was yesterday:  Technically, this was true, and if there was a court of Postal Prevarication somewhere she probably couldn't get convicted on it.  In this case it really wasn't the lie that offended, but the facts that were omitted that gave the false conclusion that the having half of yesterday's DPS would create an easy, smooth, mail delivery day.  In reality, the reason the DPS was light was because a significant portion of DPS-machineable letters were not processed by the plant, for whatever reason, and were at our cases waiting to be sorted by hand.  Actually, only about half of these unprocessed letters were at our cases in the morning, on my route about a foot and a half.  After securing time "commitments" from the carriers the manager then had the clerks spread the other half of the letters, at least another foot and a half, meaning all told about 700 pieces that had to be cased per route because they never found their way to the DPS machine. Legally she's in the clear on lying, I guess, but my prayer book talks about lies of commission and lies of omission; so Mom would still spank your blue Postal butt on this one, and the priest would give at least a half dozen Hail Marys for penance.

Postal Managers are tricksy hobbitses, everybody knows that.  I've heard a lot of managers say a lot of dumb things, and most of these I could attribute to an inability to process facts correctly (meaning being ditzy), incomplete information, or going into Postal ostrich mode - in which managers bury their heads in the sand to blind themselves from the grim reality.  But when there is such a deliberate, systematic, calculated effort to lie that includes bringing others into the conspiracy, it makes me shudder for what could happen.  The lies aren't so cute and colorful anymore.  When babies spit up it can be charming and lovable, when grown men and women do the same it's considered biological waste and can be highly toxic.


The Postal Tsunami is a starving third world baby with a horribly distended stomach.  Clicking on the cute and cuddly ads here would help nurse this emaciated blog baby back to health.  Your support is appreciated.

 The latest by Mel on Hub Pages - Is Bernie in trouble?

 

Image source:  Source: http://www.editinternational.com/photos.php?id=4e31c0fb8f71a

Cool Your Engines - Postal Accident Hat Tricks

By Mel Carriere 

In a hockey hat trick, where three goals are scored by the same player, in certain towns the adoring fans pummel the ice with dead octopi.  I can't imagine anybody lugging around a squishing, smelling octopus corpse in his coat pocket, on the astronomical long shot that a player will get three pucks in the net on the same night, only then to have one's favorite hockey jacket thrown out by a nose curling wife upon arriving home smelling like an aquarium, but it happens.

In the Postal Service there are hat tricks too.  I know a guy who missed three MSP scans in one day.  He was pelted with an octopus by his supervisor when he got back to the office.  A CCA misdelivered three parcels, for the same block, which generated three separate angry phone calls to the post office, causing it to rain octopi dozens of miles from the ocean.

Some postal hat tricks are of a more serious nature that don't involve any elaborate cephalopod celebrations. Our station is on the verge of one such ignoble triple distinction, but it feels more like strike three you are out than hey, we appreciate you so much we are going to shower you with soggy dead marine animals.

Just a week ago we were on the nice instead of the naughty list, but man how quickly that turned around at the drop of a hat, or at the drop of an eight legged, ink squirting lump of tentacles, if you prefer.  Our office had gone ninety days or so without any accidents at all, not so much as a paper cut or broken fingernail.  We were right on the verge of being awarded a big bagel party in appreciation, a sumptuous banquet  that may or not have included some octopus flavored bread spread.  Then the cruel caprices of the Postal gods changed, and they decided we needed to be punished for our accident free hubris and denied the divine manna of life sustaining baked gluten balls.

Two thunderbolts were cast down quickly from Postal Olympus.  Last week one of them struck appropriately during a freak San Diego rainstorm, when one of our carriers slipped stepping out of his vehicle and tore his hamstring.  He is undergoing physical therapy and will be out several weeks.  

This was a blow to those of us salivating with visions of free bagels dancing in our heads, which the tightwad supervisors are now going to deny, in spite of 90 days of perfection.  But it gets even worse than bagel deprivation.

On Wednesday, while delivering a package upstairs in an apartment complex, one of our carriers comitted the Postal cardinal sin of leaving his vehicle running.  This is sort of inexcusable, almost impossible to justify and equally difficult to throw down the "hey nobody told me" card on.  Two or three times a week we get one of those eye rolling, yawn stifling, here we go with the same old s*** again stand up talks where they tell us specifically not to do this. Sometimes they include pictures for the attention deficit types.

It seems like they shouldn't even have to tell us this.  It seems like every five year old since kindergarten was invented has seen Mommy take the keys out of the car before she walks them to the door.  Unsupervised keys in an auto ignition are just dangerous.  Kindergarteners understand instinctively that horrible things can happen with untended keys, like the world might spin off its axis.  Grown adult postal employees, however, either forget this or are too stressed to care, despite daily dire warnings.

The untended LLV slipped out of Park and hit a car.  The result is that this unfortunate carrier is on emergency placement, "pending termination."  He will get his job back, but it could be weeks, or even months, and in the meantime I don't think he has a lot of spare cash in the bank.

I just realized this is starting to sound like one of those same eye rolling stand up talks I hate to suffer through, to the point they give me severe mental fatigue, and you probably feel the same.  So let's go back to the former titillating discussion of marine invertebrates and threesomes, and how they interact.

Our safety captain tells us postal accidents happen in threes, so if this is true we are already two thirds of the way to a postal hat trick.  Instead of partaking of the blessing of bagels, if we have one more accident we will be served up some flying octopi.

I sure hope the octopus hat trick doesn't fall on my plate.  They're kind of hard to chew, and they can leave you constipated for weeks.


CCA Stumbling Blocks - More by Mel on Hub Pages



Image from Scott Brimer's You Tube account

Have you seen this?

Please help support the Tsunami by clicking on Mel's ads.

They don't bite and you get

Points in heaven

Mel and His Shadow Feel the Bern - Tsunami Endorses Sanders for President, 2016

By Mel Carriere


Partisan politics is something I vowed not to take part in some time ago, mostly because political parties usually enshroud themselves in ideology.  I say enshroud, meaning to cover up, because for the most part their ideology is just a cover, without any real teeth behind it.  When push comes to shove and there is a pile of tainted Superpac money being pushed across the table by some hairy knuckle, heavy breathing corporate sleazeball, all that impassioned rhetoric about protecting the little guy gets forgotten on the way to the bank

So I gave up on using ideology to pick presidential candidates.  A quote I love from a book says "ideology is mental murder."  When we straightjacket our thinking with ideology we risk missing out on good ideas just because those evil shysters across the aisle are proposing them. That is why I am trying to renounce ideology altogether and think for myself.  This is not easy, because built in biases and prejudices against those mouth breathing, knuckle dragging baboons over there don't die easily.  But my resolution from now on is to vote out of practically, not ideology, to vote for the man or woman who is going to protect my job, my livelihood.

Usually this means voting for the lesser of two evils.  Usually the candidate you wind up picking is dragging around some pretty rotten, rancid, festering dead bodies in the trunk of the campaign mobile.  Yet because the other guy is hauling his own nasty collection of decaying corpses in plain sight, even propping them up on the podium and tongue kissing them on national TV, we wind up voting for the guy or gal trying to hide their dead bodies because that way we can claim plausible deniability later.  "Hey I never knew about those dead bodies in the trunk!" Yeah right.

The long and short of it is that every presidential election we wind up picking the person we think will do the least damage, not the most good.  Then Bernie Sanders comes along.

The following is a short list of why I and my staff here at the Postal Tsunami, which consists of my shadow, have unanimously decided to endorse Bernie Sanders for president and why, if you are a postal employee. me and my shadow agree he is the only choice that makes sense for you. This was not an overnight decision.  I have to confess I was frightened off by Bernie for a while by some of the scary labels attached to him, but since everybody in this country is a socialist to some degree or another I've gotten over that.  Here are our reasons:

1. Bernie is the first and only candidate who has openly and specifically advocated a strong public postal service - If you google "Bernie Sanders Postal Service" you get a long list of articles either written by Bernie on why he supports the Postal Service, or written about what he has said or done in Congress to help us.  If you do the same for the other candidates, Hilary included, you get about 5 million results but none of them have anything to do with the Postal Service. Sure they want our vote, but none of them care enough about us to defy their anti-postal super pac allies and voice a word in our favor.

2.  Bernie sets the agenda - Bernie Sanders is the only candidate with a set of specific policies he plans to implement, and you can tell he spent a lot of time thinking about these things before he threw his hat in the ring.  Bernie has a plan, man.  The other candidates' platforms consist of responding to things Bernie said, and agreeing that these things are wonderful, but...  His chief rival's platform is basically "I'm better, I'm smarter, It's my turn, and people are ready for me." I will concede that Hilary has way better hair than Bernie, but I'm not sure how much is her own and how much is surgically implanted.

3.  Bernie has passion - While watching reruns of the Democratic debates, my son remarked that "Bernie is full of righteous indignation."  My 23 year old son used the term "righteous indignation" in a complete sentence,  God bless him.  On the other hand, there was nothing righteous or indignant about the other candidates.  Their answers came across as slick, rehearsed, and with an exit strategy.  Furthermore, the other candidates all wore phony smiles, carefully crafted by focus groups, that didn't transmit the idea of indignation in the least.

Bernie's detractors, of course, bring up some points about why he shouldn't be nominated for President.  Here are a couple:

1.  He's too old - I don't see why this matters.  At age 74, this supposedly old and enfeebled Bernie is still smarter and more vigorous than the rest of the uninspiring bunch.  Can you imagine what a dynamo Bernie must have been at age 40?  It must have been mentally exhausting to sit across a table from him.

2.  He is unelectable - According to this theory, a primary vote for Bernie is a wasted vote because, even if he does get the nomination, he doesn't have the right stuff in the eyes of the American people to be elected President.  In response to this I say hogwash.  Bernie is receiving more individual donations than any other candidate,  last I heard.  Who will he run against, anyway, if he does get the nomination?  Fluffy hair, flapping lips Donald Trump?  Bernie will eat him for lunch.

So that is why the Tsunami supports Bernie Sanders, and urges our Union to do the same.  I hope the NALC can resist political backroom bullying from "mainstream" Democrats and get behind the man that the rank and file membership knows will unequivocally support their interests at every turn.  Bernie is a veritable political tsunami, sweeping away everything and everyone in his path.  Feel the Bern - 2016.


 Bigger, longer, uncut Bernie by Mel on Hub Pages

Image from:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/20/1403997/-Organizing-for-Bernie-July-29-with-POLL?detail=hide

Watch Your Fingers - Carlsbad Mailman's Bird Comes Home to Roost

By Mel Carriere

Postal fingers are sensitive things, and a sensitive topic.  Whether you work in the plant, drive a truck, sort scheme, work the window, or deliver on the street, your fingers are important to you.  As a letter carrier out here in Carlsbad, California demonstrated so effectively with a little incident that occurred in early October, postal workers who deal with customers sometimes need their fingers for activities other than mail processing.  I know it isn't on the flow chart, but the middle finger can come in handy.  As The Trashmen sang in 1963, the bird is the word.  Problem is everybody has a camera these days, and if you don't want to wind up on the Channel 10 news you have to be very careful and use that birdy finger judiciously.

There are multiple uses for fingers that we all engage them in every day.  Thumbs are fingers too, and thumbs can be important signalling devices.  Sometimes as I am going about my daily rounds I stop and give a thumbs up to a little kid who comes out to thank me for the mail.  You can't waste words in the 100 degree Santa Ana October heat.  Funny how different fingers, or combinations or configurations of fingers, can mean different things.  As I said the thumbs up is a very good thing, whereas simply flipping that thumb around 180 degrees to a thumbs down can get you in trouble, especially if you are a movie reviewer and an unstable actor like Russell Crowe comes in swinging a telephone at you because he didn't appreciate your upside down digit.  Different combinations of fingers communicate different ideas.  Five fingers held up together to join another person's five outstretched fingers signifies approval, support, or solidarity.  Raising your little finger and index finger while leaving the two middle ones in a down position is a gang sign, however, and could get you shot in certain neighborhoods.

Finger communication used to be a good way to signal your truest, most heartfelt emotions and then deny everything later.  Words have staying power, fingers have plausible deniability.  "I was scratching my nose," you could always say in the past, "and when I was in the process of lifting my finger they got confused and thought I was flippin' the bird." 

Plausible deniability is getting tougher every day, because now everybody has a smart phone with a camera.  Earlier this year, the day I got back from vacation, a customer took a video of her harassing me at the mailbox, claiming I had misdelivered her mail.  I finally gave up and gave her a 3575 with the 800 number on it, because I knew she wouldn't be smart enough to remember it by herself.  Some people can't spell A-S-K, and they get confused when I tell them.  She claimed I slapped her with that 3575, which was utter nonsense.  She took the supposedly damning video into the Post Office, probably expecting they would either pay her off or at least  fire me immediately.  The video backfired on her.  We had a tough female manager at the time; the only one we have had with any real balls. She looked at the video, told the customer to stop harassing her carriers, then chased her out of the building.  I have never heard from that customer again.

I have seen the TV news report about the encounter that now famous Carlsbad letter carrier had with a customer, but unlike the general public, being a letter carrier allows me to read between the lines.  The carrier was parked in the red zone in front of the mail boxes, but where the hell else is he supposed to park?  Do the customers expect him to park half a block away to drop off three or four boxes?  Okay, maybe he blocked their car in for a second, but how long did they think he was going to be there?  Can't they chill for a few seconds while he finishes delivering THEIR mail?  To me it looked like the customers were setting him up because they wanted their fifteen minutes of fame, and unlucky for the carrier it happened to be a slow news day.

Unfortunately this mailman's middle finger got carried away, and it was caught for posterity.  Now his bird has flown and come home to roost all at once, though it was mysteriously blurred.  That blur could be anything, I would claim.  Could have been a peace sign.  Could have been a "You're number one."  Fingers have a mind of their own, I would tell the boss, you never know what they're going to say next, darn little buggers.

What do you think - Watch the video

CCA Stumbling Blocks - More by Mel on Hub Pages

 The Postal Tsunami derives its coastal destroying power through copious amounts of Starbuck's coffee,  which is not cheap.  Unless they completely annoy or offend you, please take a look at what my blog sponsors on this page have to say.

Photo from:  http://news.yahoo.com/photos/postal-carrier-gives-middle-finger-photo-004125128.html

Eye in the Sky - A Postal Blowhard Speaks on Authorized Lunch Spots

 

By Mel Carriere

From Mel's Postal Dictionary:

Blowhard - a bag of wind of the high temperature variety, usually visibly bloated, commonly inflated by a belief that its talents and intelligence level are responsible for its elevated position in the workplace hierarchy, but more often than not occupies its present position because they couldn't find another butt to fill the seat.

There, you see, I could have been a lexicographer instead of mailman because I can write dictionary definitions like nobody's business.  So here is your ever humble Mel to report on blowhards and other topics at the end of physical year 2015, which up until recently I thought was fiscal year, until my error was pointed out Wednesday, the last day of the physical year, by a supervisor who is obviously smarter than the rest of us, thank God, and that's why she's in charge.  She kept saying physical year over and over again, so after the stand up talk, having realized I had everything mixed up, I walked back to my case singing Olivia Newton Jaundice Let's get Fiscal, thinking about how Zed Leppelin's Fiscal Grafitti was my favorite rock album of 1975, and worrying over the impending fiscal I had to get at the doctor's office on my upcoming day off, which might include a finger wave. So let's all get Fiscal, and talk about things that are happening at the Post Office as the new physical year rises from the ashes of the old.

Specifically, I want to discuss blowhards, a term I defined above, and I want to pose a question to those of you who are more knowledgeable in contract matters than I, in hopes that you will post a reply in the comments section below.  I have to confess I am confused by something a supervisor said at another stand-up talk (Not Olivia Newton John gettin physical), but another male supervisor who is king of the blowhards and will make bold pronouncements with little regard for whether they are true.  So even when he's right, as he might very well be in this case, I tend not to believe anything he says.

Postal Blowhard Supervisor started off his grandiose speech by implying that we should be grateful to him because he was going to share some of the elite inner circle secrets that were revealed to him working at the great Postal Eye in the Sky for several weeks, a place located in a concealed bunker at a former processing plant on a lot that is up for sale for scrap but nobody wants to buy it because it's contaminated.   According to him he is sharing this privileged information with us because he really appreciates all the work we do, so he said. The main theme of his speech was that letter carriers were getting busted left and right by the great Postal Eye in the Sky, which of course spies on you through your friendly blue hand-held scanner.

He related to us the story of one carrier who got called out because he was stopped 22 minutes in the same place.  The Eye in the Sky was on the job, thank goodness, and dispatched a supervisor to the scene of the crime to investigate before matters could escalate.  

"What are you doing here for 22 minutes?" the supervisor asked.  I'm paraphrasing the story.

"I had to use the bathroom."

"The bathroom?"  The supervisor looked around.  "This is a residential area.  Tell me where you used the bathroom and I will go and tell the customer thanks, on behalf of the Postal Service."

"Okay, I lied," the letter carrier quickly confessed.  "I was taking my lunch."

Immediately I was confused, so like I should have done a little over three decades ago when I was in school and in the same state of befuddlement, I raised my hand.  "We're not supposed to eat lunch in our vehicles?" I asked.  I eat mine in my LLV everyday, so this was troubling information.

"Oh no," he quickly clarified.  "You can eat lunch in your vehicle, but you have to be in your authorized lunch location."

Mr. Blowhard dismissed us from his little smoke blowing, chest thumping party, and I went back to my case, where I spent a few moments digesting the information we had been blessed with by this generous, nice Supervisor who really cared about us. 

A couple things started to bother me.  First of all, I suppose I have been mistaken to believe that I am entitled to eat where I want to during my unpaid lunch break, as long as it falls within the magical mile radius I think we are granted by the contract, outside of which the LLV turns into a pumpkin or you drive off the edge of the Earth, whichever comes first.  I mean, by definition the word authorized, as in the term authorized location, means that somebody is exercising authority over me, which by extension extension implies that I am on the clock.  And if people are authorizing me, or giving me orders at any given moment of the day, that means that I should be getting paid for it, and I'm not.  What I'm trying to say is that if you want to tell me where to take lunch you ought to be paying me for it.

For those of you heavily immersed in the chapter and verse of the letter carrier contract, is there any validity to this concept of authorized lunch locations, or was Mr. Blowhard Supervisor just spewing out superheated air from his inflated head to intimidate us into staying in a place where we can be easily cornered.  Or was he trying to imply that 22 minutes is way too long to spend on a thirty minute unpaid lunch break, and maybe we should cut it to 15 or better yet, zero.

I am trying to update the items in my Postal Dictionary, if you could give me a hand.  Does the word authorized lunch spot really have any contractual basis, or does it mean whatever Blowhard Supervisor says it does?

Happy Physical year 2016 - Mel.


Who is the most postal-friendly Presidential candidate, or should I say the only postal-friendly candidate? - More Mel on Hub Pages. 


 The Postal Tsunami derives its coastal destroying power through copious amounts of Starbuck's coffee,  which is not cheap.  Unless they completely annoy or offend you, please take a look at what my blog sponsors on this page have to say.