Corona Virus Paralysis - Nothing New Where I Work

By Mel Carriere

This topic is tired, I acknowledge.  But the subject is still mutating, so I mutate along with it.

I recently wrote a longish article called "A Letter Carrier's Guide to the Corona Virus." I will post a link at the bottom here, in case you haven't read it.

If you haven't read it yet, and you decide to, you will probably be shaking your head as you go along, remarking what a dumbs**t I am.  Although the article only came out a few days ago, it already seems obsolete.  The information there is not completely relevant anymore.

In this week designed to reflect upon our sins and do penance for transgressions, I give you my humble mea culpa.  If any of the particulars in that article are misleading, I apologize.  I wrote it with the best of intentions, not for shock value, but to inform people, based on the most current data. But as it turns out, the things we know about coronavirus change daily, what was true yesterday is no longer true today.

One thing that has not changed, one thing we can rest assured will remain constant in this cruel, capricious Postal Universe, is that no matter what crisis rears its ugly head here, it will be reacted to badly, wrongly.

It is times of crisis like these where we see what our leadership is truly made of.  We get to gauge their mettle under pressure, to find out if they are legitimate or just faking.  To see if they are doers, or just talkers.

Sadly, my conclusion so far is that our leadership has been woefully lacking, from the top down.  The powers that be saw the pandemic coming, and they tried to ignore it.  It was banging on the door of the fiesta and they just turned the music up, hoping it would go away, so it wouldn't spoil the party.

Once they reluctantly acknowledged this ogre to be real, what was done about it?  Were any measures swiftly put in place to ensure the safety of those who would be forced to go out into public while everybody else was hunkering down, sheltering in place?

As a microcosm of this sad state of affairs, I will now relate my own little slice of the big Postal pie, in regard to where the safety of letter carriers, clerks, mail handlers, custodians, etc. etc. world without end amen is concerned.

When I went to Costco on Sunday to pick up a few essentials, I saw a changed world.  In contrast to the beginning of the shelter in place order, which had somewhat of a holiday atmosphere, people were now taking the thing seriously.  It was starting to hit home.  Almost everyone had a mask on, people were maintaining a six feet squared social distance, and nobody was lingering about in the store to browse.  Everybody was getting their stuff quick, and getting out quicker.

Monday I returned to work after a few days off.  I expected the gravity of the situation I saw in Costco on Sunday to carry over to my place of employment.  The CDC had just announced they recommend wearing face masks in public, so certainly I was now going to be provided with the appropriate safety equipment.

Standing by the time clock, preparing to punch in, I looked around me at a spattering of face masks worn by my co-workers, mostly of the homemade variety, the kind you fashion out of a pair of old underwear, hopefully the most minimally-streaked skivvies found in the drawer.

After the supervisor sauntered over to the gathering five clicks fashionably late as usual, she read us the daily coronavirus update bulletin, this one emphasizing the recommended use of face coverings, as I mentioned a couple paragraphs above.  The memorandum clearly stated that in the event that we don't have a face mask, we will be provided one.

I meekly confess that I don't have a face mask.  During the rush to rescue goods from the hoarders, I was mega manly where it came to scoring toilet paper, pitifully poor in the face mask department.  Truth is, I didn't really try to get any.  Just about a week ago, I had listened to a lady from the World Health Organization on the radio who said that face masks were not recommended, and could in fact be dangerous, because they give people a false sense of security.

At the present, that recommendation has changed.  The most current data demonstrates that the virus can be spread by asymptomatic individuals, meaning people that are carrying the bug but don't feel it.  Therefore, the experts are now advising us to use face coverings, not so much to protect ourselves, but to protect others.

Accordingly, I accosted by supervisor for a mask, as instructed by the bulletin.  I must say she reacted quickly, going into the office and fumbling frantically through some cabinets, only to come up empty.

The manager then walked in, wearing a gangster handkerchief over her mouth, like she was going to pull a heist once she got off work.  "Do we have any face masks?" the supervisor asked her, with syrupy, but probably superficial sympathy to my situation.

The manager looked at her like she was the recipient of the dumbest question of the week award.  "No, we're out," she said.

She then turned her bandanna in my direction.  I flinched a little and reached protectively for my wallet.  "Couldn't you get any?" she said, her tone indicating that I was a complete failure as a human being.

"Where am I supposed to get them?" I protested.  "I ordered some on Amazon, but they don't get here until late May." By that time we'll all be dead, I thought but of course didn't say.

No satisfaction there.  In retrospect, I realize that this was a big charade.  My supervisor was only pretending to be worried about me, knowing damn well there weren't any masks in stock, just trying to point the finger away from her toward the manager.  This is a typical example of the Postal redirect the blame school of leadership.

Okay, I am not unreasonable.  I know that face masks are in short supply, but if other organizations are able to obtain them for their essential employees, how come we can't?

That same morning, I had gone into Circle K as usual, to buy my coffee.  The two clerks there were both wearing surgical face masks. Not makeshift homemade ones, but the kind they equip hospital personnel with.

"Does the company provide those for you?" I asked.  Enthusiastic nods of affirmation.

That afternoon at work, during my break I went into 7-11 for a Big Gulp.  Again, the clerk behind the register was wearing a surgical face mask.

"Does the company provide that for you?"  I asked.  Enthusiastic nod of affirmation.

I walked away frustrated.  Your neighborhood convenience store can commandeer safety equipment for its employees, but the biggest organization in the country cannot.  AND WE'RE THE FRICKIN' FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!!!

No need to say more, for now.

More from Mel: A Letter Carrier's Guide to the Coronavirus

Postal Scandemonium - Will Scanning Overkill Bite Us In The Butt?

By Mel Carriere

Our competitors love to shame the Postal Service for alleged poor scanning, writing us off as bumbling boobs - overpaid, under-worked, unmotivated, bla bla bla government sponges, lounging around on the public dole. In reality, Postal scanning is not the simple proposition it is for our delivery counterparts in the private sector. Yes, incompetence is part of the scandemonium we encounter in the Postal workplace, but not on the level an outsider, looking in, might think. The real catalyst of scanning snafus is the Postal Service's unique situation of being a dumping ground for all packages, big and small, from all over the planet.

No matter where you ship on this big blue marble, postal competitors FedEx and UPS - to cite the two Great Danes but keeping our dog spray ready for the lesser delivery lap dogs too - have a neat, standardized bar code on all packages, the same one no matter their place of origin. The other big dog on the block, Amazon, generates its parcels from its own network of warehouses, so it is slapping its own clean, sexy little label on every box that goes out the door.

On the other hand, the Postal service receives shipments from every obscure, backwater post office on the planet, each nursing along its own stone-age bar code technology. Take for instance those tiny SPRs, arriving by the hundreds in big plastic bags, each little chunk's address written in microscopic script that Ant Man can't read. The bar codes from the Philippines are different from those from China, Indonesia, Great Britain, etc, the list being as long as the United Nations roster.

Admittedly, writing a scanning percentage program to accommodate all of these displaced orphans would not be an easy proposition for the most highly skilled programmers, and I think we can all agree that postal software developers are not always the best and the brightest. Furthermore, from my experience, the USPS does not invest heavily in beta testing. They don't send out scores of system development people onto the bomb cratered front lines, to observe job processes and talk to employees to see how the work gets done, in real world conditions (Think FSS). No, they throw things together on the fly based on wishful thinking assumptions, then expect reality to bend to the ideal. After that,the next few years are spent stomping out bugs scurrying across the workroom floor, when with a little forethought the cracks in the baseboard could have been patched early on. By the time they do manage to plug the holes in the boat, the clumsy scow is now obsolete, and it's on to the next technological fiasco.

Unfortunately, my particular post office is one of those "vital few" in scanning percentage, as defined by the dictates of this awkward program that is not sure what it is measuring. The term "vital few" actually sounds kind of groovy, like you're an elite bunch indispensable to the continuation of the free world - Fantastic Four, Fox Force Five, Vital Few. But in the world of postal euphemisms the nicer something sounds, the worse it is. If I go home tonight and tell my non postal wife  hey honey we made the vital few, perhaps she, in her blessed and blissful ignorance of all things postal, might be impressed. Yet anyone who humps mail for drinking money knows this is not a good list to be on. They can't get away with saying shirt list, however, so they put an ambiguously non threatening title on it, like vital few. 

In an effort to increase our piss poor performance, our vital few office now has had two extra burdens shoved into our saddlebags. These came down not so much with realistic expectations they will improve scanning, but for punishment. 

The first of these twin pillars of postal penance is to scan load feature for every package. I'm not talking shoe box size and above, but every package, from that fifty pound box of brake shoes you lug up two flights of stairs to that feather light SPR that blows away if you sneeze. All creatures great and small. The rationale given for this - because sadists have to invent a reason why the pain they inflict upon you is for your own good, is so the parcels will show up in the look ahead feature. But guess what, I checked and if packages pass through the PASS machine they are already in parcel look ahead. You don't have to load scan them to get your kiss on my list. This fallacy now being debunked, the only remaining reason is punishment, like I said.

The other side of the loaded punishment coin that flips tails every time, because it kicks you in the tail, is that we have to scan every single package on the street too. Again all creatures great and small. Those wafer thin packages from the Pacific Rim that cost a buck twenty five to mail and have clearly bogus bar codes that clearly say DO NOT SCAN - we have to scan them. Just in case, because the postal parcel percentage program is a mystery that even its creators cannot figure out, and nobody has the skill or the will to fix it.

Our office continues to muddle along with this exercise in futility, but I don't think we're out of scanning jail yet, because nobody has paroled us from these twin handcuffs. Meanwhile load times go up because of the extra load feature activity, but scanning overkill will continue until some whiz kid upstairs sees our load time numbers in red ink, and it becomes the flavor of the month again.

Our little office is probably not unique, I am pretty sure this is happening in a lot of places across the country.  And the only people happy about the widespread bar code bonanza are certain Asian entrepreneurs, who are getting their packages tracked for free. Certainly the word has already spread, from Ho Chi Min to Hong Kong, that you can slap any type of bar code on a package and some flunky across the wide Pacific moat will scan it, no charge. Why pay for tracking at all? These Asian mailers laugh sadistically as thousands of letter carriers struggle to aim their scanners at tiny barcodes, then watch the scanner say "Whoa, what the fu-, is this international?¨ while millions of dollars in lost scanning revenue pour into the ocean. There this giant fatberg of misspent funds adds to the growing mass of the Great Pacific Garbage Island, creating an inescapable whirlpool where technologically inept companies spin down the drain.

But how can you plug a hole if you can't find it? Sticking your finger in the dike might be a good stop gap measure, but there are no visible cracks in the dam to plug our digits into. What we've got here is a serious slab leak folks, one that requires digging up the whole porous foundation and starting over. Can our good old multi purpose MDD scanners save us? I think they are useless as flotation devices, but least they have GPS, so the Coast Guard can find us when the whole shoddy mess drifts out to sea.

Photo by Mel Carriere

Don´t Wreck My Shady Postal Lunchtime Zen

By Mel Carriere

The best part of my Postal day is my half hour lunch. The edible fare is not particularly inspiring - variations on the theme of peanut butter, chips and yogurt, but the reading material I lug along in my orange Homer toolbox takes me to other times and places, providing a temporary refuge away from mundane postal reality.

My lunch spot, as such, is an inviolable temple, where supplicants approach with hesitant humility, and only on an extremely legitimate pretext. No, I don't know where your package or letter is, especially if you don't live on my route. And no, I also don't know what time your carrier will be there and, another no, I certainly do not have their phone number to ask them. The latter is probably not true. I probably do have his or her number, but I'm not going to give it to you, and I'm not going to wreck their lunchtime Zen by calling about your bullshit.

However, if you just want to dump off a letter and run I will take it with a smile, as long as your definition of letter is not a trailer full of prepaid parcels. For that you'll have to wait, for my half hour lunch is sacred.

I have been taking my midday break in the same spot, off and on, for about twenty years. This shady lunchtime Eden is a church parking lot. In winter, when the shadows are long, I park in the lee of the church building, but in summer, when the sun is high in the sky, I move to the shade of some trees on the other side of the asphalt. Everything is scientifically calculated and astronomically correct. A decimal point deviation from the norm and my island of tranquility is inundated, swept away in the deglaciation of this cataclysmic climate change.

In other words, I don't like to be bothered on my lunch break and generally, nobody bothers me. There are really not many people afoot in the midday hour anyway, with the unfiltered sun beating down from its Zenith. The only people out in those sweltering noontime doldrums are old Asian ladies pushing their groceries home from the store on their little handcarts, or the occasional homeless person, availing himself of the same shady sanctuary of the church lot. 

This latter group never bothered me either, until recently when some newly transplanted transient arrived in the neighborhood. This man seems determined to wreck my personal lunchtime zen, and to disrupt the normal flow of life everywhere around him.

My first knowledge of this newbie came when I heard him shouting obscenities one day from across the street, where I was delivering mail. I could not immediately pinpoint the origin of this non-stop flow of verbal toxic waste.  Then a little later I approached my lunch stop, and saw a homeless person beneath my sacred tree, sitting like some profane Buddha of an anti-enlightened cult, spewing his warped wisdom. He had a large dog in tow, but the canine seemed to be either deaf, or had constructed a psychological barrier around itself, to buffer its sanity against the non stop rants of its so-called master.

In other words, the dog was the calm one of the pair. I wasn't afraid of it, but because the attitude of its human freaked me out somewhat, I prudently pulled around to another tree.

The Do Not Disturb sign on my lunchtime leisure was starting to rust on its shingle. A portent of perturbations to come?

A few days later our little street corner prophet was back in action, sitting by the exit of the supermarket next to the church, holding a  cardboard sign that said GIVE ME MONEY, then flipping off all motorists who refused to comply with his humble appeals. 

So far, however, Moses bringing down the wrath of God from Sinai had not particularly affected me. I had not been the subject of his obscene sermons, and his single digit blessings had not been directed my way either, as far as I could tell.

That changed last Friday. Friday was a particularly sweltering day by our spoiled San Diego standards, so I think I parked beneath my Bodhi tree about the same time our ragged oracle was seeking shade too, after a hard morning raining damnation down on the Israelites.

I had just eagerly cracked open my book, a particularly good one, when I was shaken by the voice of judgement.

"Hey you, this is the FBI. Come out of that vehicle with your hands up."

I recognized the voice by now, so I wasn't particularly startled, just surprised it had turned its attention to me. Despite my lack of worry, I double checked the door was locked. You can't be sure what kind of wrathful actions the voice of God in the heads of these major or minor prophets might direct them to do - smite the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, or some such.

"Yeah I said you. This is the FBI. Federal Bureau of Investigation. I said come out with your hands up. I don't care if you're a government employee."

Of course I didn't get out of the vehicle. I didn't even stick my head out of the window. But the homeless deliverer of doom was undaunted, unleashing a string of unprintable Mother Hubbards. Yet as intimidating as the voice pretended to be, it was receding into the distance. Being a 6 foot 3 Goliath-champion of the Philistines myself, I think homeless guy decided that if he was going to bring my big ass down, he needed something with more firepower than a slingshot.

A mailman has his finger on the pulse of a neighborhood better than anyone, and I could see the balance of power among the neighborhood homeless shifting. I really don't have a problem with the unsheltered inhabitants sprinkled throughout my route, but the harmless homeless are fleeing before the fire and brimstone of this invader. There is a humble homeless who shares the lunchtime lot with me, carrying his green Living Bible and not interacting with anyone in a bummer way, but I have not seen him since the seventh seal was opened and this new plague was unleashed on the Earth.

I'm not trying to be some sanctimonious defender of the downtrodden. I just don´t want mean homeless guy to wreck my lunchtime Zen. Can´t he allow me one measly half hour a day in the church lot, by virtue of I was there first? Instead, he seems to be throwing down the gauntlet. What's the big deal, just give me my half  hour and then he can curse and fling birds from out of nowhere, like a Vegas magic act, the rest of the day. That is - if the priests don't boot his butt for blasphemy.

Scanner Backlash - 50 Foot Fetish

By Mel Carriere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Mel Carriere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Fox 19 in Cinncinnati, Ohio

Are All Postal Supervisors Created Evil? - With Bonus Thoughts!

By Mel Carriere

A month and a half ago, I published an article on Hub Pages relating the events that prompted me to disavow dark side  204B life and return to righteous living as a letter carrier.

My story was well received, taking in a lot of views.  Like a horror movie, people get a visceral thrill looking behind the curtains of a secret torture chamber where they would never set foot, but still can't resist a voyeuristic peek into.  I thank you all for reading.  

After I shared the post on Facebook, most of the feedback was favorable, meaning that people were entertained or informed without making value judgments about the author. But there was also an undercurrent of hostility also, which I kind of expected.  A certain percentage of letter carriers extends no tolerance or forgiveness to anybody who has ever dabbled in the arcane magic that is postal supervision.  In the opinion of this small but vocal minority, all 204Bs past, present and future should be strung up, drawn and quartered, and roasted on a spit, not picking one of the three as punishment for this mortal sin, but doing all of them in order, starting with the most painful.

Here is an example of the outrage expressed:

"The truth?  You're one or the other.  Make your choice, stick with it, and don't try to justify the things you do to the one's you have done it to.  No one feels sorry for you.  No one cares. Own who you are."

What can I say to assuage the offended feelings of this individual, or anybody else, who despises me for once being a 204B? Probably nothing.  No amount of chest pounding mea culpa, self-flaggelation, wearing of the hair shirt, rolling around in sackcloth and ashes, would change this or any other similarly-opinioned person's perception. 

So I'm not even going to try. I actually did write a long harangue to respond, then decided to scrap it. This blog is about letter carrier life in all of its facets, it is not a crying-hanky platform to defend my hurt feelings.  Instead, I will pose the following question:

Are all Postal supervisors created evil?

We all know some good ones and some bad ones, some smart ones and some dumb ones, some stressed out and some laid back ones.

There are those who get into it for the right reasons, because they sincerely want to change things for the better. There are those who do it because they couldn't handle working for a living in craft (Note: these seem to be the managers who rise highest up the ranks).  Then there are a few who got pressured into the job by spouses who got tired of washing their sweat-soaked uniforms.

To me, supervisors are not automatically born with the mark of the beast stamped upon their foreheads, or with devil horns. Sometimes they start off good but their position of power, however pathetic that power may be, goes to their heads.  Even the meekest mouse of a man can become authoritative in such a role.  Still others revel in the power from the beginning and become consumed by it.  Finally, a significant portion manage to retain their humanity through the constant floggings from above.

My conclusion? Postal supervisors are not one size fits all. I don't think they are necessarily created evil. I believe they are a regular cross section of humanity within a normal standard deviation, containing good apples and bad apples who somehow got stuck in a superheated forge in which a few melted beyond recognition, others pulled their nuts out of the fire before it was too late, and still more learned to become pretty handy with a pitchfork, both on the giving and receiving ends.


Good Cop / Bad Cop Supervisors (Bonus Thoughts!)

This next part is only marginally related to the above theme. Still, it is close enough that I don't think it merits its own blog post, because it serves to demonstrate how management takes advantage of different supervisor personality types to enforce its insidious agenda. A prime example is what I call the good cop / bad cop routine.

Good cop / bad cop is a real interrogation technique, included in the training manuals of Federal agents.  I know this, I am not making it up, because a friend of mine managed to get a copy of one. Now, I am not saying they send postal supervisors to torture training, though that lady quoted above, the one who accused me of all sorts of high crimes and misdemeanors, would probably say they do.

In Good Cop / Bad Cop the really mean, nasty, fire-breathing SOB bad cop enters the interrogation room first to verbally abuse, then threaten to beat the bejesus out of the poor guy in the hot seat unless he cooperates.  After this they let the interrogee simmer in his juices a while, worrying all the time if Bad Cop is coming back. Next they send in Good Cop, who is just the opposite of Bad Cop.  Being a super chill dude, he goes to the poor sucker handcuffed to the table with a lamp pointed in his face, possibly electrodes taped to his family bling, gives him a cigarette, tells him everything will be all right, nobody is going to hurt him. They rotate through the Good Cop / Bad Cop cycle a few times. Then at last Good Cop complains that if he doesn't come up with something soon they are going to kick him off the case, leaving the suspect squirming in the chair to the not so tender mercies of Bad Cop alone. The interrogee is so afraid of Bad Cop coming back he confesses everything to Good Cop.

This week, they tried a variation of this technique in my office. We have a Good Cop and a Bad Cop Supervisor in house, but Bad Cop isn't smart enough, Good Cop isn't devious enough, neither one communicates to the other anyway, so they don't give me the impression they planned it on purpose.  I think rather that they stumbled across the scheme by accident, but I could be wrong.

Anyhow, on Tuesday Bad Cop informed us in the morning stand up talk that Good Cop was in trouble. On Tuesday he had to go to the postmaster's office and give account for his sins, to explain why he had so many carriers out past 1800 on Monday.  Of course it was his fault, it had nothing to do with the mail volume, the available manpower, or any other circumstances out of his control.

Naturally we all felt bad for Good Cop, because he treats us with respect and doesn't hold us to unreasonable expectations.  He also works really hard and does his best to get us the things we need to do our jobs properly, like changing out broken CBUs and parcel lockers.  When most of your requests to management fall on deaf ears, you appreciate a guy like that. To a point.

But Bad Cop was really laying the guilt trip on us about Good Cop, insinuating that if only if we had behaved better Good Cop wouldn't be lugging his cross up the hill to Calvary right now, sneakily implying that if we wanted to keep Good Cop around in the future we better get our act together.

Maybe as a younger, more naive letter carrier I would have been stirred emotionally by Bad Cop's plea into doing whatever it takes to help out poor Good Cop, like cutting a break here and there, or even giving up that most sacred interval of my day, my half hour lunch break. But now I'm older, considerably jaded, and cynical as hell.  Furthermore, having sat in that hot seat myself and escaped with my soul more or less intact, it is hard to sympathize with people who willfully continue to subject themselves to it, like an abused spouse who keeps going back to take more beatings.

Therefore, in lieu of my reluctance to work myself to a complete frazzle for Good Cop, I will offer him some advice instead:

If you can't take the heat stay out of the kitchen.

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.

No, not all supervisors are created evil, some have evil thrust upon them, but I'll be damned if I'm going to follow them down that narrow road to hell.  Good cop, bad cop, I cop out.


Footnote:  Good Cop later confessed to me that he wasn't singled out for punishment with the postmaster, but that the subject of 1800 carriers was just one of many topics addressed at a supervisor's meeting.

Postal Tsunami Musical Guest: George Thorogood Bad to The Bone

Image from Pixabay.

Give a Brother a Break - Mel Bemoans Angry-Villagers Response to Dog-Spraying Mailman

By Mel Carriere

I like to keep it light here on the Tsunami. Although I deal with some weighty issues, I try to tackle them in a satirical way because, as the late Robin Williams said, "Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma."

Alas, there wasn't enough comedy in the world to help Robin deal with his demons, and these days I'm not laughing much either. Don't go all crisis intervention mode on me. I'm not suicidal, I am simply deeply disappointed how people, including letter carriers, so quickly go into mob mentality to drive one of their own out of town with flaming torches and pitchforks. Especially when, in this case, those letter carriers should know better. It also disturbs me to have complete confirmation on what a bunch of muck-raking whores the media are, and how easily people believe those shameless tarts.

And to think at one time in my life I aspired to be a journalist, deluded into thinking the profession was a pillar of truth and integrity. How gratified I am now that I did not pimp myself out to those scoundrels, that instead I am an independent commentator, not being yanked by anybody’s puppet or purse strings.

What I am specifically speaking about is a Facebook post made earlier this month, which shared a televised news report of a mailman spraying a dog behind an allegedly secure fence, allegedly repeatedly. I’m going to use the word allegedly a lot in this post, because I think the lies were thicker than the flies on that steaming pile you just skipped around on your way to the next mailbox. For some reason the story gathered momentum, probably because the report included endearing footage of the alleged victimized animal being lovingly embraced by small children, who allegedly had to be rushed to the emergency room because they allegedly came into contact with the pepper spray that allegedly painted the dog from his furry white ass to the tip of his slimy nose. It was picked up by a lot of networks, even on Spanish speaking news channels.

This is not the first time I have written on the subject of why letter carriers should not be so quick to throw a brother or a sister under the bus when they are caught on Candid Camera doing something that apparently looks bad (See September 21, 2018 edition of the Tsunami). To your credit, a lot of you hard-hearted cynics out there who commented on this post, those of you who aren't suckers for every furry face, came to the carrier's defense. Others, unfortunately, could not wait to blast this mailman with the same dog-repellent he allegedly used to needlessly douse the dog. Here are some of the comments the news report evoked among the letter carrier lynch mob:

He's a scumbag

He's a douche bag

He's a piece of shit

He should be fired

Asshole.

Point me in the direction of this piece of excrement.

As The Smiths Morissey, an artist who as far as I know never pepper-sprayed a dog or any other beast in anger, once sang: Heavy words are so lightly thrown.

These heavy words particularly weigh upon my soul. For once, I am not writing the Tsunami from the isolated sanctuary of my kitchen table, trying to interpret events hundreds or thousands of miles away via the distortions of the cyber medium. For once it hits really close to home. This is because I personally know the clear-headed, intelligent young man who is the alleged perpetrator of these allegedly evil needs. I also know his beautiful young family, whose lives have all been permanently affected by the public outcry and the kickback it has caused.

So I ask all of you angry villagers, so eager to string this young man up, to deprive him of employment and ruin his life, to those of you so evidently hypnotized by touching scenes of allegedly brutalized animals that you even insinuate violence against his person, I ask you Why are you acting this way?

Because postal customers always tell the truth?

Give me a break. Good one. Really?

A few weeks ago, a customer complained to the boss that I neglected to attempt a signature confirmation package at her door, claiming I didn't show up on her doorbell cam. What really happened was that I forgot to take a 3849 with me, so I actually stood there facing that camera, for a couple of minutes, praying that someone would answer. Then I left a notice left slip downstairs in her CBU mailbox, because there was no way I was going to drag my ass up those steps again, cam or no cam. One good thing that came out of it is that I learned I am invisible on camera, like a vampire, which creates the potential to cause all sorts of mischief.

And if I had a peso for every time a box full customer swore they checked their mail every day, and I just had it in for them when I killed their mail after holding it the required ten days, I could buy one of Chapo’s villas and retire comfortably.

Then, lest we forget, every mailman's favorite Customer fabrication, - my dog is never loose, or even better, That's not my dog. Ever heard those doozies?

Still, in your righteous indignation, overwhelmed like Donny Osmond with puppy love, you sit there telling me customer mendacity doesn't apply in this case. I can hear you murmuring all the way over here on the west coast - yes, I can perceive your snarky comments above the crashing of the waves. You're saying Mel - you're one of those indiscriminate, trigger-happy dog sprayers yourself, that's why you're defending the guy.

To which I answer, I have sprayed exactly one dog in my postal career, about 23 years ago. This was an Australian Shepherd, who blinked twice and kept coming. The bitch later fell in love with me. I have that effect on women. Anyhow, ever since then I don't bother. Don't tell my boss but I don't even carry the stuff. Twice I have used my rather Sasquatch-proportioned foot on attacking dogs, because it packs a more powerful punch. I didn’t do it on purpose, it was a reflexive act of defense, but I have to say these snarling beasts slink away like the cowardly little curs they really are inside, after getting my shoe leather lodged up their nostrils.

I have to admit that, in this current case of the pepper-spraying mailman, I too was at first overcome with righteous indignation by what I saw on the news. But then, because the incident strikes so close to home, I became privy to important information about the case by people in the know. The accused letter carrier was not among them. Although I know him personally we have not spoken since the incident. At any rate, his personal account would be naturally biased, and therefore unreliable. I'll just say I got my scoop from a reliable source, someone who is not a friend of the carrier and has no reason to defend him.

After a great deal of soul-searching, I have decided I am not going to disclose the particulars. If details of the postal investigation are supposed to remain secret, I am going to let them remain secret. Furthermore, if I let the cat out of the bag here, no amount of pepper spray will force it back in, and it might lead a damning burnt-orange trail back to yours truly. Let's just say that the information is convincing.

I'm not going to jump out a limb and say the carrier is completely cleared of malfeasance here, because such a claim might come back to bite me in the butt, or at least in the back of the leg, like that little yapping cocker spaniel who got me many years ago. And although I do love poultry, crow meat is pretty gamey. All I’m saying is that there appear to be enough irregularities, enough holes in the dog owner's story, to give this brother the presumption of innocence until the alleged clouds of dog spray mist settle and the mess can be sorted out.

Even if cleared of animal cruelty, and of the alleged respiratory problems of the children in the household, allegedly caused by the repeated pepper sprayings, does this mean the carrier is innocent of all wrongdoing?

Not by a longshot. There was plenty he did wrong, plenty that I would and have done differently. If this really was a problem dog, I would have held the mail. The first time the customer would have to move the mailbox, the second time the customer is done. That’s being generous, because in our district the official policy is that one incident is the death penalty, but I believe in giving everyone a second chance.

Some letter carriers, however, are intimidated by the residents on their route. This is understandable, because in rare cases postal customers can be downright psycho. I make no assertion that this was the case here, but certain mailmen just don’t want to deal with any potential problems. They don’t want the threats and confrontations stopping someone’s mail privileges can cause, so they continue delivering, choosing instead to protect themselves the best way they can. Me, I’m old and ornery, so I don’t care. I have stopped mail for multiple houses, and had the box moved for countless more. Bad things have been flung at me because of it, but I wipe myself off and keep on trucking.

Now about those whores in the media who reported this, all I can say is that it must have been a slow news day, and here was a sensationalistic piece with a tear-jerking angle those TV hounds could really sink their teeth into. Did the so-called newsmen exercise journalistic integrity by waiting until the investigation was over before roundly condemning the letter carrier involved? Hell no. If the mailman in question is eventually exonerated, do you think his vindication will get any air time at all? Hell no. WIll an apology be issued for the disruption in his life their sloppy, unprofessional reporting has caused? Again I say Hell no.

Time will reveal the complete facts of what really went on here. But in the meantime, I admonish you, my beloved readers, to please exercise restraint. Remember all the times you have been falsely accused of something you didn’t do because, if you have spent any length of time as a letter carrier, somebody has already spun a tangled web of lies about you. Think about how you feel when this happens, and Give a brother a break.


See the report yourself here

Postal Tsunami Musical Guest:  The Smiths, What Difference Does it Make

Image by Fqugdvin via Wikimedia Commons