Target Twerp Disses Post Office

By Mel Carriere

Mel is mobile again!  He's got his wheels and hopefully his mojo back.  I apologize to my faithful readers, but I was away on a kind of self-induced tsunami sabbatical, caused by transportation issues and a sort of mental hibernation that accompanied it.  Now that I'm rolling once more I feel saucy enough to refer to myself in the third person again.

The eye-rolling monotony of postal existence has not changed since I wrote my last blog post three months ago.  Supervisors are still repeating the same stupid things at the same insipid, wearisome stand-up talks.  I could blog their inane absurdities every day, but then my posts would quickly resemble the repetitious drivel they spew out.  You get paid for enduring them, but not for reading me, so I'll spare you.

Needless to say, I've been at a loss for ideas, but if you do any kind of writing you know that you can always count on some idiot to come along and bust you out of your writer's block - kind of like Michelangelo dynamiting a block of marble and producing the Pieta.  This is hardly the Pieta - it's more like the obscene garden statue I saw of a troll scratching himself, but it operates on the same general principle.

My sudden burst of inspiration took place in a Target store a couple of evenings ago.  Target has taken a lot of heat lately, simply because they want to try and make people comfortable in the bathroom.  I don't want to join in on the Target bashing.  I like Target, I shop at Target frequently, but they really have to rein in some of their maverick employees.

I was standing cooling my heels in a nearly empty Target checkout line while some kid cashier wasted his time, and mine, trying to flirt with a lady who looked old enough to be his mother.  He was attempting to seduce her by explaining the complexities of his Target Point of Sale System.  When he had exhausted his repertoire of  nerdy amorous advances this admirably patient woman was finally able to escape and I, at long last, was able to step up and pay.

As I approached the register I got a closer look at the twerp, and pretty much saw what I expected to see. The kid looked like he took second place in a Harry Potter look alike contest; like he didn't win because he was a little short and pudgy and had a pimple on his forehead instead of a bitchin' lightning bolt scar.  His glasses  were of the thick frame, pointy end variety we used to call "birth control" in the Navy, because they scare away most women.  This is a real optometry term - if you Google or Bing it you'll get dozens of four-eyed dorks.

As I paid, the little twit tried to sell me on the advantages of saving 5% by signing up for a Target card.  I understand he has to do this because Target big brother in the back room is watching; but that's not while I'm calling him a twit.  You'll understand my choice of pejoratives in a moment.

I told Not Quite Ready for Hogwarts boy that while I wasn't interested in his card, could I please get an application for someone else to send in via the mail.

"Who do you want it for?" he said in a snotty, surly tone that he definitely didn't use on the God Bless You Please Mrs. Robinson standing in line ahead of me that he had been trying to impress. His inappropriate intonation sort of took me aback.

Although I didn't think it was any of his damn business who I wanted it for, I told Gryffindor Quidditch team reject that it was for my son.  I did not add, because I shouldn't have to, that the kid is trying to establish some credit so he can finance an automobile.  At the moment, he is content borrowing Dad's car and not making payments, so if I don't set the application in front of him he won't do it.  

"He can apply here or online,"  the bug-eyed brat said.  He handed me a flyer with the directions on it.

"What about the mail?" I insisted.  "Can he mail it in?"

"Yes, he can do it at home on the computer," this obviously wand-less boy wizard replied.

"No, I mean the U.S. mail," I repeated carefully and slowly so that the idea would penetrate his brain, which was obviously so cluttered with Target-sanctioned mantras that he had forgotten how to analyze information for himself.

With an obstinance that would make Lord Voldemort throw down his wand and give up, Harry Potter's rejected evil twin, probably abandoned as a baby in a Diagon Alley dumpster, laughed and said to me,  "Oh, I didn't even think they had a mail service anymore."

I was wearing my Postal Uniform.

Still standing stunned in front of the register, I couldn't help but wonder what he used those big, thick glasses for, because he obviously couldn't see straight.  Maybe he couldn't fly his broom straight either, which is why he worked at Target instead of chasing golden snitches on the pro circuit. Filled with righteous indignation, meaning I was a little pissed off , I sort of barked back at him.  "Listen, I work for the Postal Service.  I bust my ass delivering the mail everyday."  Did I really say ass?  I can't remember.  I hope not, but it's possible.  I was kind of fired up.

"Oh, so that's why you want to use the mail," he said with a stupid sneer and snicker.  

"No, that's not why," I started, but it was pointless to continue. I gave up, grabbed my merchandise and left.  

This is what we're up against, Postal People.  In spite of Target's costly computer hacks, they still insist on doing everything online.  Not only that, but they would prefer to take all of your sensitive personal data right there at the store, to have you trust it to the safe keeping of Harry Potter boy, who not only failed Defense Against the Dark Arts, but I'm pretty sure flunked out in Potions class too.

All the stores are doing this.  I tried Sears and Macy's, and got the same confused looks from everybody, like they wondered what planet I was from, asking for an application to send in via the mail.

I live on Planet Postal, if you really want to know, and I'm proud of it too.  Go ahead - give your social security number to some four-eyed flunkee if you want, I'm going down the road to buy some stamps.


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Postal Safety Lip Service - Strange and Gory Tales from the Postal X-Files

By Mel Carriere


Every day postal employees are literally beaten to near unconsciousness by safety propaganda, to the point where they are literally slipping, tripping and falling over a perilous obstacle course of posters, videos, and mind numbing management blabber related to safety in the workplace.

Now I'm not here to tell you safety is unimportant. Unfortunately for those of us who are rolling our eyes and banging our heads against the metal sides of our letter cases during those interminably monotonous water boarding sessions known as stand up talks, people do need reminders, because a lot of folks think they are living on a separate plain of reality in some Einsteinian parallel universe where the laws of physics do not apply to them. Even if you tell these people 20 times a day "put on your seat belt," even if you imbed a nerve wracking electronic voice in their scanner with this message on continuous loop, tomorrow you will catch them driving untestrained through an intersection with the door open.  So yes, I concede that while reminders are annoying, they are important.

No, my main gripe is not how safety is stressed, but how it is used.  We have a supervisor who repeats the perpetual mantra "I don't want to have to tell your family members..." like it's on a rosary.  She will swiftly and mercilessly punish you for safety infractions, especially if she doesn't like you.  On the other hand, if she's in a bind, she doesn't have any problems making or letting you work when you are injured.

In other words, my question is, are postal supervisors truly committed to our safety, or are they only paying lip service to the concept, perhaps using it as a justification for discipline while completely ignoring it when convenient?

Here's a couple true stories as anecdotal evidence:

One of our carriers tripped on a manhole cover, severely injured a muscle or tendon, and was out for months.  He could barely walk, but when he got back to the office after the injury the supervisor had him split the route before going to the doctor.  Safety first!

Another terrible tale from the Postal X-Files of the unbelievable:  Even more recently, a letter carrier was bonked on the head when lowering the top gate of an APC.  He bled severely and profusely.  Not knowing what had happened, while going to the bathroom that day I saw bright red drops of blood leading to the sink.  Hansel and Gretel could have followed these through the forest and they wouldn't have had the problem of birds eating the bread crumbs.  The supervisor worked him a couple more hours casing routes before he left for medical treatment.  Turns out he had to get staples in his head.

Admittedly, the injured employees have more than a measure of blame here.  They should have told the supervisor "No I'm hurt and I'm leaving," or better yet, insisted that someone call an ambulance.  But then again, about 90 percent of we human beings have this damnably dangerous trait of not wanting to displease people, even as the custodian is mopping up our life's blood behind us.  Supervisors know this instinctively and take full advantage of it.

So what's it gonna be, Madame Supervisor?  Does my safety really matter, or is it just one more thing you're going to beat me over the head with?  I need to know, because I don't want to tell my family I'm flat on my back for six months because you didn't do the right thing.


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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. 


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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/


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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.


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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.


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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