Sample This! - What Do Y'all Do When Your Scanner Talks to You?

By Mel Carriere

When you are a letter carrier and you start to hear voices talking to you in your vehicle it could have one of many causes.  First of all you could just be loopy because of the heat and you need to pull over and hydrate.  Secondly, the ghost of that welfare mama whose check you killed right before she died in the crack house fire is clinging to your LLV; her cursed, vengeful spirit whispering in your ear in hopes you will drive off the road.   These days, with the advent of the GPS era there is another cause which makes less sense then the others but still needs to be discussed.  This is that your postal scanner is actually talking to you.  Sounds stupid, I know, but it happened to me, and since I was on my medication that day I'm pretty sure it was real.

When I left the Post Office around 9ish some day early last week I went to do an hour and fifteen minutes of overtime on another route first.  As I approached the first delivery on my route at 1685 I heard an eerily robotic voice issuing forth from somewhere, telling me I had to sample five mail pieces across the street at 1680.  

I slammed on the brakes and let the initial shock wash over me - that of being spoken to by a device that wasn't the electronic leash slash cell phone in my pocket blaring out the voice of my wife scolding me because I spilled milk on the floor and the ants were dancing in the kitchen.  Then I looked down at the scanner screen, because the mysterious voice seemed to be emanating from its general direction, and saw the same "sample five items" message displayed there.  

At this point several puzzling questions began to occur to me.  First of all, was I expected to cross the street out of sequence, dig through the DPS for five pieces of mail I could "sample," and make the delivery out of order?  Secondly, what did they mean by sample, exactly?  Was it like a hip-hop sample, where I take five letters and mix them together, to the general confusion and mostly drug induced entertainment of everybody?  Was I supposed to take a picture of the mail pieces, and if so how?  I know these scanners are equipped with a camera, but I don't know how to access it.  Next, what if there are not five pieces of mail for that address that I can sample? 

Confused, I called my manager.  This was not helpful, because she was equally confused and didn't know what I was talking about.  She spoke to me calmly and gently, as if she thought I really was hearing ghosts of pissed off postal customers past in my ear, and told me not to worry about it.  I took her at her word and somehow exited out of the program after getting an ominous message asking me if I REALLY wanted to exit without sampling, as if there could be possible consequences, such as jail time, or perhaps being tethered by my wrists from the ceiling in the Inspector's Gallery with electrodes attached to my sensitive regions; a place where no one can hear me scream.  

I wondered if I was perhaps being tracked and penalized because my arrival at my first delivery did not match what DOIS projected, because I did my overtime first, as we are instructed to do.  Could it be that the supervisor had not yet made the DOIS assignments, so the scanner reported back saying I was taking an hour and a half break, and this had caused deafening sirens to go off in Supervisor Spying Central - a hidden underground bunker a little like the Central Intelligence Agency War Room, but without the intelligence?

When I finally did arrive at 1680 about an hour and forty five minutes later the voice came back right as I was pulling up to the box.  These little GPS spy machines are deadly accurate.  They can track the testicles on a flea from outer space.  Anyhow, I noticed to my amazement that not only did 1680 have 5 letters to sample, it had about nine of them, and it made me wonder how the scanner knew that.  Does it talk to the DPS sort plan on a daily basis?  The problem still remained how to sample them, but it finally occurred to me to scan the DPS bar codes on the mail pieces.  It worked!  The scanner gods were appeased and I was allowed to go about my business, without any further intrusions into the sanctified, private inner space of my LLV.

A couple days later my Manager went to a meeting and asked about the talking scanners.  She said that yeah, they were doing this everywhere and that I did the right thing by scanning the bar codes.  Good thing they told us about this in advance, instead of after about 14 letter carriers drove their LLVs into a ditch!  I found out later that this happened to one of our CCAs too, and she was so startled she almost had an Early Onset Incontinence Episode (EOIE) in her postal pants.

The point is, who has time for any of this sh**!  What I should have done in the first place was lift my proud middle finger to that blabbermouth scanner and tell it to "Sample this!"


 What's in Your Mailbox, Mailbox Infestations and More - More by Mel on Hub Pages

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Labor Day Letter to our Postal Plant Manager - Why Can't We Have the Luxury of Screwing up too?

By Mel Carriere 

I really don't want to put a bummer on your Labor Day Weekend.  I try to think about all the positive things organized labor has done to give us holidays like this where we can relax, have a few beers, and enjoy the fruits of our "labors."  But centuries of fighting for our rights through collective bargaining has not yet altered the basic fact that somebody in management will sooner or later come along and do something stupid that we have to pay the price for.

All right, I asked for it, I'll admit.  Nobody put a gun to my head and made me sign up to work my holiday on Saturday.  Therefore, I really have no right to complain about what a hellish mess it is was.  But then again, complaining is what I do, it is what this blog is basically for, because who would want to read my rosy postal portraits that are full of palm tree framed blue skies, like the pretty picture above?

So from my little corner of palm tree lined Postal Paradise I decided to pen this little letter to our Postal plant manager, who was at least partly responsible for the wearisome debacle that last Saturday became.  How was your pre Labor Day Saturday, by the way?  Let me know in the comments below.


Dear Postal Plant Manager,

First of all I am not usually a disgruntled type.  I agree with a lot of the ideas that you and others occupying positions of power throw out there for postal and public consumption, I just wish that you people would follow through on some of them.  For example, there is the idea of load leveling.  In concept keeping a smooth, even work load throughout the course of the Postal Week sounds like a wonderful idea, but your execution of the load leveling principle reminds me of having the passengers of the badly listing cruise ship Costal Corcordia quickly run to the other side, uphill on a slippery deck, to redistribute the weight.  Who am I but a humble mailman to offer an opinion on matters that are way over my pith helmet covered head, but in the future I don't think you should wait until the plant is sinking under the rivet popping weight of undelivered mail before you decide to push it all out to the delivery units the day before a holiday.

Problem is that you always have the unsung Distribution Clerks and Letter Carriers to pull your nuts out of the proverbial postal flames.  The Saturday before a holiday we are required to take everything, so by that juncture it is no longer load leveling but employee leveling, as it brings all of us long suffering delivery unit employees down to the same withered, frazzled, unrecognizable exhausted shells of human beings that we didn't really have to be,  if you had found it in your infinite wisdom not to give us one foot of flats on Thursday and Friday and 10 feet on Saturday.

Am I really supposed to believe that this extreme inundation of mail at the last minute just showed up at the plant out of the blue, that it hadn't been sitting there simmering alone in an abandoned corner while you made your numbers look really good during the week?  This look good now and to hell with later and everybody else philosophy was something you were more than willing to trade an atrocious Saturday for, because on Monday there will be nobody to scream at you anyway, and by Tuesday the tragedy will be nothing more than a distant, irrelevant memory lost in the nostalgic thoughts of beach barbecues and beered up baseball games that some of us had the energy to attend on Labor Day Weekend.

Again I proclaim my inability to believe that this avalanche of bulk rate flats we had on Saturday just materialized out of thin air.  Am I really expected to believe that the dedicated and highly motivated employees of corporate America worked extra hard generating countless mounds of mail on Friday instead of taking a half day like normal people so they could beat the traffic out to Vegas?  Was this truly the reason we were flooded with mail on Friday worse than when the dam busted in Johnstown - and you very respectfully Mr. or Mrs. Plant manager had nothing at all to do with it? I think there were so many delayed bulk rate flats piled up in the plant Monday through Friday; stacked to the ceiling like combustible cordwood, that the Fire Marshall would have condemned the place.

But our clerks went ahead and sorted it diligently and faithfully on Saturday, and our carriers went ahead and delivered it in the same manner because that's what we are there for, living in the trenches on the Postal front lines.  We exist to correct your errors in judgement, accidental or intentional, for the benefit of the American public.  We don't have the luxury of screwing up and won't do it on purpose to improve our numbers, but still you ties and skirts sit up there smug on Mahogany Row and complain about what a lazy lot we all are.

So very respectfully thank you, Anonymous Postal Plant Manager, for turning me into a one dimensional human being on Saturday that worked to the point of exhaustion, went home and performed basic biological survival functions, then slept the sleep of the rock breaker of the month on the prison chain gang, but without the honorary parking place.  Thank you for helping me to ignore and neglect my family by turning in at 8 PM on Saturday night while you probably partied late and long into the weekend, seeing as how I doubt you even worked Saturday, as the rest of the postal faithful did.

Sincerely,

A tired, disgruntled but always respectful Mel 


Which Postal Poison Pill is for you? 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.

What is Your Postal Supervisor Doing While Your Life Sustaining Fluids Drip Onto a Scorching August Sidewalk?

By Mel Carriere

Photo of Scooby, feeling a little loopy in the August heat, also by Mel Carriere


It was 97 frickin' degrees in San Diego yesterday.  I had the long weekend so I'm not complaining, but what the hell are we paying San Diego prices for if we are going to get Florida weather?  While my coworkers were out there dripping away their precious life's fluids onto the soil and sidewalks, instead of driving out some bottles of cold water I'm sure our supervisors we're sitting around complaining about how lazy letter carriers are and wondering why the hell they didn't bring their jackets because the air conditioning makes the office so damn cold.  Which raises the question, while you are out there baking your brain in the hot August sun and wondering why you ever signed up for this crap, what is your supervisor really doing back there in the PO besides grumbling about how slow you are?

I'll be the first to tell you that being a supervisor is a stressful and demanding job.  Sometimes Postal supervisors work 15 hour days, get compensated for 8, and when they complain are then told by upper management that they should work more efficiently so they can get the job done on time.  Typically upper management is populated by backstabbing incompetents who were bad supervisors who delegated everything to 204bs.  Therefore, they really might not be aware of the workload associated with running a Post Office.  Just don't think I'm accusing all supervisors of being lazy here - Typically about 30-40% of supervisors work themselves into an exhausted frazzle in order to pick up the slack for the other 60-70 percent who take extended lunch breaks and then lock themselves in their offices to play on the computer before going home early.

A new report about a hack attack on Ashley Madison, a website that apparently promotes and facilitates marital infidelity, bears my hypothesis out.  Among the 36 million Ashley Madison accounts hacked, 52  were using a USPS.GOV address to log on.  I already know what your keen, discerning, critical mind is thinking right now; that 52 accounts out of 36 million is not very much at all, not even a drop in the proverbial bucket.  So our organization has a few under-worked philanderers with too much time on their hands and not enough sex on the home front, big deal?  No, what this really means is that we have 52 under-worked philanderers who were STUPID enough to use their postal email address to set up an account on the site.  I'm sure those 52 were not even the tip of the iceberg, but the handful of microscopic water crystals at the tip of the tip of the iceberg consisting of probably thousands of other supervisors who were smart enough to use a private email address to log in.  Even so, these uncounted thousands were still out there cruising for tail on a government computer with their feet up on a government-issue desk, while every once in a while adjusting the thermostat because it's just too damn cold in the Post Office in August, after which they go out to the workroom floor to yell at a 204b, then return to the computer and minimize the Ashley Madison screen so they can check up on where you are currently wasting time.

A spokesman for the Postal Service Inspector General said that "more information is needed before determining if any violations occurred."  I think that means the OIG has to make sure none of its own people's names are on that damning email list before they start pointing fingers elsewhere.

Perhaps the only solution is to start using GPS monitors on those fat-ass supervisors and station managers, admittedly not all of them, who take two hour lunches, tell the 204b to hold all phone calls, and then disappear into the office until 3:30, at which time they warn that trembling 204b doing both his and the manager's work on the computer that he better come up with an acceptable excuse to explain his or her absence in case the Area Manager calls.  Hmm...Maybe ankle bracelets would be better, ones that set off a deafening alarm wail if the manager punches out before eight hours are up.  On second thought, I don't think anybody manufactures an ankle bracelet that will wrap around some of those fat ankles I've seen waddling out of the Manager's office.  Any suggestions?


 The Postal Tsunami gains its coastal destroying power with 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.

What Extinct Mail Dinosaurs Do You Recall? A Trip Down Postal Memory Lane

By Mel Carriere

I just read an article on Postal News reporting that Columbia House, that seemingly indestructible mailing giant of yesteryear is going bankrupt.  This news came as a shock to me because I thought they died a long time ago, but it doesn't cause me any heartache.  Yes, I did get my 13 vinyl records for 1 cent (Can you believe that things are so expensive now my keyboard doesn't even have the 'cent' symbol?). I was a naive 14 years old when I received that musical manna from heaven, but after the happiness wore off I spent the next couple years dealing with the realization that I actually was obligated to buy a few things.  When you're a teenager without a job and a miserly old man yelling at you to get one every time you ask for a few bucks, this can be problematic.

 God bless Dad for teaching me character, and for teaching me how there's a sucker born every minute.  Now I'm older (yes) and wiser (eh-maybe), and looking back retrospectively on the glory days of mass Columbia House mailings I participated in early in my postal career, as well as other hogs of the postal parcel hamper that used to take up a lot more space within those dusty canvas or plastic depths than they deserved to.

Columbia House packages were a real pain in my blue postal pants.  They came in many sizes, some big and some small, but there was one particular size that just would not fit in an apartment mailbox no matter which way you turned it.  I seem to remember it was about a half a centimeter too big.  One would think our sagacious folks working in mailing requirements could have done something to have the musical mega-mailer shave off a couple layers of cardboard, but those bulky things always had to go to the door.  The real problem wasn't so much delivering them, however, as it was taking them back.  There were plenty of broke teenagers like I once was out there who would hand the packages back to me with the words "Did not order" written across the front in bold Sharpie pen, and would keep doing this until they got a nasty, threatening, legal sounding letter from the company.  This meant that every day I had at least one Columbia House item I had to stamp "Refused" after I got back to the office, when I was already rushing to do a hundred other things before I clocked out.

Another bad thing about Columbia House was that when these packages got forwarded they usually had a postage due charge that you had to collect on.  I would do my best ninja impersonation trying to leave a notice and sneak off the doorstep before somebody answered, but I invariably got caught, and once in a while there was a customer who actually wanted the package.  Who has time to stand there for five minutes while the customer protests "why the hell do I have to pay the postage?" - then spend another five minutes waiting for him to search the house frantically for pocket change?

I'm probably going to miss a few things here; and I welcome you to fill in the gaps in my memory down below in the comments, but there were a few other annoying mailings that used to suck the precious postal time transactor clicks away like bull elephants drinking at a waterhole.  One of these was cereal samples.  When I was brand new I remember dealing with cereal box samples where you had to match a tiny card with a tiny box in your sample tub.  There were sometimes about ten samples or so per swing.  I was new back then, I really didn't know how to manage this sort of thing, so I would always wind up missing about half of them, which made our 204b laugh at me when I got back to the office.  The only benefit of this mailing - I have heard, because I never dared this, is that some letter carriers would eat the samples going to vacant houses.  They would lug along a carton of milk on cereal sample day just for this purpose.

But the mother of all postal pains, of course, were the AOL CDs we used to deliver by the hamper full back in the late 90s, early 2000s.  Some days it seems I would spend half an hour in the back of my LLV sorting those things for delivery, only to find the slick metal cases piled up on top of mailboxes the next day by customers who had absolutely no use for them.  I take that back - I read somewhere that bird lovers were hanging the CDs from strings by their windows so that birds wouldn't fly into the glass.  I don't know how exactly that worked, but other than that they were worthless.  Now these relics are selling on Ebay as collectors items for $12.99.  Who would buy that crap?  Some slick shyster has a whole refrigerator box full of these in his basement and is suckering them off on collectible junkies.  What a racket.  I never want to see one again.


 The Postal Tsunami gains its coastal destroying power with 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.

 My latest on Hub Pages - What's in Your Mailbox? Part 4 - Homo Sapien Horrors

Image from:  http://www.ebay.com/itm/1999-AOL-America-Online-5-0-CD-Install-Disk-Software-250-Free-Hours-New-Sealed-/400459446398

Don't Get Comfortable - Can a "Good" Supervisor Survive in a Hostile Postal Universe?

By Mel Carriere

This is not a plea to declare this "Hug your Supervisor" day, or anything silly like that.  I would never go that far; some of them don't seem to brush their teeth so I it would be wrong of me to advocate getting any closer than you have to.  But I think we have all had the admittedly uncommon experience of having a supervisor that is organized, actually responds to your requests for the things you need to serve your customers and deliver your route efficiently, and isn't cracking your skull with his or her clipboard every day to get you to go faster.  These people are rare, I know, but they are out there.  The problem is that they just don't stick around very long, but quickly become casualties of the cruel and oppressive system they willingly participate in.  Like a male lion taking over a new pride, Postal Management tends to devour all of the young that don't carry the same defective DNA.

At my station, we currently have a supervisor who seems to possess those admirable qualities that are like the kiss of death for anyone aspiring to move up the ladder in the Postal Service.  He prints out our change of address labels on a daily basis (before him we got them once a month or so), he posts the DOIS report by the time clock like he is supposed to, and he negotiates with, rather than horsewhips carriers when he is running the floor.  Unfortunately, since he is the junior guy, the unpromoted 204b, he usually only runs the floor on Saturdays.  I predict he won't be running anything at our station pretty soon.  We have a tight inner circle of inept (dare I say ditzy) supervisors who are absolutely terrified by the threat of competence and scurry to chase it out the door just as soon as it makes its presence known.  If they performed their jobs with the skill and industriousness with which they eliminate rivals our post office would be a model of efficiency.

A friend and coworker of mine always greets the newbie supervisors with the words "Don't get comfortable," because he knows they won't stick around long, especially if the carriers like them.  Supervisors like this usually get left "holding the bag," or becoming scapegoats for bad mistakes or serious, willful breaches of postal regulations that they had nothing to do with.  For instance, they might be left running the floor alone with piles of curtailed political mail that have aged like rancid beer, not fine wine, to first class status.  Even though this poor sucker may been ordered to continue curtailing this way overdue political mail on a day when the other supervisors all conveniently take the day off, he or she is the one caught with his or her proverbial postal pants down when a representative from the Operations Department shows up in the station to make sure all of that mail has been delivered.  Weird things like this tend to happen in our Post Office to those who aren't thick like thieves with the rest of the scheming, calculating, and figuratively gnarled and warty coven members cooking up evil curses around the Postal cauldron.

Throwing your coworkers under the bus seems to be a sure fire way to achieve promotion in the Postal Service.  Spending most of your time on the phone, thumping your chest with some higher up instead of doing your job is another effective way of moving up the ladder.  Violating the contract, hiding mail, and harassing underlings look pretty good on a postal resume too.  Going about your business quietly and efficiently, on the other hand; doing everybody else's work in addition to your own, gets you thrown out quicker than last week's moldy bread.

So on second thought, if you are one of the few postal employees who actually likes your supervisor, don't hug them after all, but pretend that you hate them.  Spread the word that they are tyrannical bullies that don't know what the hell they are doing.  This will help them blend in with the rest of the useless, drooling, sad sack drones that are only good at feathering their own nest, and maybe help them stick around for a while.


Dancing with the Devil - More by Mel on Postal Supervision on Hub Pages

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Image of my LLV among the palm trees by me

The Death of DOIS? - Or: Better Uses for the Bomb

By Mel Carriere

I wrote this on August 6th, which probably quite by coincidence happens to be significant for two reasons.  The first of these is that August 6th, 2015, is the 70th anniversary of the day the US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.  I don't want to get overly political here, I guess there is no use crying over spilled milk, especially if you are not Japanese.  It seems to me, however, that even though Harry thought he was doing the right thing when he lit that big candle, I think there were better uses they could have put the "Little Boy" to than laying waste to this coastal city on the Seto Sea; but I guess the fat cats wanted to get the biggest bang for their buck.  One idea would have been to drop it over Tokyo Bay for pure shock and awe effect.  Or perhaps they might have picked a remote military target to minimize civilian casualties.  Better yet, they could have saved it to drop on Eagan Minnesota, to take out the DOIS mainframe there before that postal destroying cancer could metastasize and spread its evil tentacles.

Turns out they might spare Eagan and the DOIS facility the 20 kiloton radiation treatment, because the second significant event I heard about today was that DOIS might be on its way out on its own, the powers that be finally admitting defeat and recognizing that DOIS, unlike Little Boy, did not give them the bang for the buck they were dreaming of when they dropped this nasty monstrosity onto the once pristine, pastoral prairies of the Gopher State south of St. Paul.  The shock and awe management expected from their DOIS bomb did not materialize, although the fallout from the Postal blast reverberated around the country and inflicted many unfortunate casualties among carriers that were displaced or reduced to PTF.

I received this tidbit about the demise of DOIS from a Union officer who dropped by my case today and asked me how I was doing.  You know me, I never complain about anything, so I told him I was doing just fine, that nobody had bitch slapped me with a copy of the violated contract lately. I suppose he could see the long shadow of my broken down Honda Civic on my face, however, and took that to mean that I really wasn't doing so hot and needed something to cheer me up.  So quite without my prompting, he gave me the heartening news that postal management is recognizing that DOIS is not giving them the accurate information they need to evaluate routes, so that when they actually go out and do walk routes they are coming back with despondent faces, because the numbers that the DOIS machine has been pumping up their already swelled heads with don't match reality.  He didn't actually say it like that, I threw in those colorful descriptive terms on my own, but that was the essence of the DOIS part of the conversation.

Furthermore, it turns out that the route adjustments they have done throughout our peaceful little seaside burg of San Diego are resulting in adding routes, not eliminating them, like they assumed would happen while they were drooling over the overly optimistic DOIS projections that the computer spits out from the foul innards of a mother board that is as warped as the heads on my Honda engine.  He said don't be surprised if they don't do the "you say toe-may-to, I say toe-mah-to" routine and call the whole thing off; and this would not surprise me at all. I think abandoning bad adjustments has been done a lot lately, my evidence being that we haven't had any new ones in at least four years, maybe longer.

The NALC Rep told me that parcel volume seems to be the annoying fly buzzing around the server room and throwing the data off.  Try as it does, the challenged little DOIS choo-choo that couldn't just can't huff and puff and sputter its way up to the summit of the lofty parcel peak carriers climb every day as a matter of routine.  Meanwhile, the brain trust sits in the mahogany lined chambers at L'enfant plaza scratching at their straining skulls and coming to the conclusion, albeit reluctantly, that perhaps the parcels don't deliver themselves after all, like DOIS says they do.

Although the potential death of DOIS is encouraging news, the toxic DOIS mushroom cloud still billows above us and I don't think it is safe to take our radiation suits off just yet.  If there is anything I have learned after 22 years in this organization it is that there are a lot of stubborn people making decisions in high places who will stick to their bad ideas and their bad programs long after they have been absolutely proven not to work.  So let's not declare VE (Victory in Eagan) day just yet, although as a former sailor I wouldn't mind putting on my cracker jacks again (they don't fit), and kissing a cute nurse in the street.

 

For Your Friends Contemplating RCA or CCA - Which Postal Poison Pill Should You Swallow

 The Postal Tsunami gains its coastal destroying power with 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.  I have removed Amazon.


Image is attributed to:  "Atomic bombing of Japan" by Nagasakibomb.jpg: The picture was taken by Charles Levy from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack.Atomic_cloud_over_Hiroshima.jpg: Personel aboard Necessary Evilderivative work: Binksternet (talk) - Nagasakibomb.jpgAtomic_cloud_over_Hiroshima.jpg. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atomic_bombing_of_Japan.jpg#/media/File:Atomic_bombing_of_Japan.jpg

Image of sailor kissing nurse from:   http://www.news.com.au/world/its-been-a-long-time-coming-marissa-gaeta-and-citlalic-snell-share-us-navys-coveted-first-same-sex-kiss/story-e6frfkyi-1226228219550

Things Not to Say (Or Do) to Your Letter Carrier on Their Lunchbreak

By Mel Carriere


On my blog header you can now see me stoically staring down the onrushing, coastal ravaging Postal Tsunami that obliterates everything in its path, thanks to some Photo shopping by my son, who trembles under the constant threat of being disinherited of the few pennies I have in my pocket if he doesn't comply with all of my silly, arbitrary, practically unintelligible requests. I don't know if you can actually see the new photo header on your phone, but if you go to your laptop; or if you are one of the few dinosaurs who still uses a desktop model you can see it there, and God bless you for looking and for using antiquated technology.

Today's topic is letter carrier lunches, a subject I think is near and dear to the heart of those of us who swing the satchel for a living, because lunch is that one precious half hour in an otherwise frenzied, feverishly paced, oppressively overburdened day where we can flip the bird at the world and say "Leave me alone I don't get paid for this." I eat my daily lunch in the same fairly secluded place where I am largely out of view of postal customers and supervisors alike. 22 years in this business, however, has taught me that if there is one thing that the sometimes mentally deficient, letter carrier annoying public is good at is finding ingenious ways to ruin our lunch.  Something tells me that if we could manage to haul our huffing and puffing little LLVs to the top of Everest to take this half hour midday break, thinking we would be safely secluded there, some determined customer from the wrong zip code carrying a 3575 notice left would find a way to scale the sheer ice cliffs with no ropes and no oxygen to ask if we have his package.

A large percentage of these lunch wrecking, peace perturbing customers are well meaning busybodies who perhaps are under the misguided impression that being a government employee means that they pay our salaries, which of course gives them the constitutional right to interrupt the lunch that they don't really pay for, even if we did get paid for it, which we don't.  On the other hand, other lunch wreckers are just meddling, bombastic jerks with nothing better to do than harass people.  The following list of what not to say to do to your letter carrier on his/her lunch break deals with both of these types, and I'm sure you can think of many more clever things not to say or do to you at lunch, which I invite you to share in the comments below.

Please don't say (or do) the following to me on my UNPAID lunch:

• Can I get my mail?  I know you think you pay my salary, and I know you think I'm just wasting your time and taxpayer money lounging beneath my favorite tree, but no I am not going to cut my unpaid lunch break five minutes short or more to dig through the flats, parcels and DPS to pull out your mail, unless you are one of my favorite customers - which, chances are, if you are doing something like this you are probably not.  One lunch wrecker who somehow suckered me into digging through piles of mail in the back of the LLV swore he was going out of town immediately on an emergency and it was a matter of life or death that he cash his check now.  The very next day he was back requesting the same thing, apparently having teleported, hyperspaced, or astrally projected back from the one crisis, and now immediately needed his mail again to deal with another.  

•  Do you have my package?  A couple of weeks ago a customer from the next route over accosted me in the blissful Eden beneath my peaceful postal lunch tree and rather rudely insisted that I had his package.  "What is your address?" I asked, trying to hold my tongue in check and be nice.  He told me his address and I responded that no, I didn't have his package, to which he angrily insisted that yes, I did have it because the tracking number said so.  "Yeah, but you have the wrong mailman," I answered, pointing to the sign at the corner, where my route and the neighboring letter carrier's intersect.  "Well, what time does he get here?" he asked with an annoyed scowl.  "No idea," I said, and kept munching.  I knew, more or less, but I didn't feel like telling him.  That's what you get for being a douche.

• Aren't you supposed to be working?  A lot of postal customers don't actually say this, but I can read it in their faces as they deliberately buzz my LLV with their cars to try to scare me into cutting my lunch short so they can get their mail a couple minutes earlier.  One time some kids on scooters came by and actually did ask me this question, but in a way they indicated that they thought it was cool I was being sneaky and hiding from the boss - kids can appreciate sneakiness if anybody can.  "Yeah, but don't tell anybody," I answered, and my little co-conspirators scootered away with big grins on their faces, delighted that I had let them in on the secret.  But only kids get to ask this question.  If you are over the age of say 12 and you have the audacity to ask me this I'm putting your mail on permanent dog hold, even if you don't have one.

•  Can you get out of the truck?  What really irks me is when some lady or gentleman who is either overly portly, lazy, or both comes by with a letter to mail when I'm eating and expects me to jump out of the LLV to fetch it.  Now, the one thing I don't mind doing when I'm lunch is taking your letter from you; unless it comes with tediously stupid questions affixed where the stamp should be, and I'll even take a couple steps out of my way to retrieve your letter WHEN I'M ON THE CLOCK.  But don't think your little mail boy is going to cut short his precious UNPAID half hour (I just can't stress unpaid enough) so you don't have to bother to put your rather over-sized, jiggling buttocks in motion. Therefore, don't be surprised when I pretend I don't see you and drive away, meaning you'll have to haul your rather pathetically inert carcass all the way to the post office after all.

•  AND ABOVE ALL NEVER SAY:  I hate to bother you on your lunch break but...If you say this I'll know you are a lying, worthless sack, because if you really hated to bother me you would have waited until my lunch was over to bother me.  One fellow who "hated to bother me" did so because I forgot to put the flag back down on a mailbox two blocks over.  He walked those two blocks - in the rain, no less, to resolutely deal with the imminent doom that this postal crisis threat to the free world portended.  I just let him stand there and soak for a minute, then asked him if he wanted a Dorito.

So please don't perturb your Palm Tree Postman while he is blissfully ensconced in the shady, inviolable, sacrosanct confines of his lunchtime temple. We letter carriers across America go out of our way to make you happy; sometimes doing things that are technically not even within postal regulations if we really like you, but grant us this little unpaid half hour of peace, please.


More by Mel on bad Postal Customers here

 The Postal Tsunami gains its coastal destroying power with 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.  I have removed Amazon.