Mailing Minutiae

You can't mail a day-old pheasant after Labor Day.

This is among the many things you can find out about the Postal Service if you lower yourself into its website and thrash around a little. There are numerous portals to branching catacombs of obscure minutiae and if you have the patience of Job's wife you can sometimes whack your way to an answer, often inside of a half-hour

It's really not the website's fault. There are no easy answers at the post office. But there are people who do know all of the answers. They're called clerks, and they have powers. A clerk can weigh an envelope to precision on her fingertips, in a half a second.

You can hand a clerk a parcel to mail and she'll have it sized up before you get it out from under your arm, and will whip out a customs form--the big one, not the small one, or the green one, because each has its unique function--in triplicate, and shuttle you to the side to fill it out.

"It's not a snake, is it?" she'll say. "There are some countries you can't mail a snake to."

Really none of her business, I thought, but I shook my head, crossed out "snake" and wrote "gift" on the customs card. How much was this going to be?

"Depends. It's one price to Canada or Mexico, and another to most other countries, except Flackland, which has levied an arrogance tariff on items originating in the U.S. since 2017, and, of course, Lower Begonia isn't accepting any mail pieces at all."

"It's not?"

"Only in months ending in 'R.' Their prime minister is trying to manage civic expectations by limiting joy. Also, snakes."

I handed over the customs card, and the clerk crossed out some of it and rewrote it on the correct line, whipped tape around the plastic, affixed it to the box, bounced the box a couple times on her palm and said Sixteen Fifty-Five. I got out my card and she set the box down on the scale for a nanosecond, muttered Yep, and slapped on postage, accompanied by an ethereal chime somewhere between a cash register and Glenda, the Good Witch.

Anyway, this time I had this teeny package and wanted to avoid the post office lobby during plague season, so I tried to calculate postage using the postal website. And she's a bitch. She won't let you slide over to the next window until you're done answering questions.

What zip code are you mailing to? Mailing from? What date? What time of day? What moon phase? What, if any, planets are in retrograde?

Is your package stiff? Squishy? Rancid? Prone to melancholy?

Are you mailing:

   Cremated remains?

   Liquids? (This could apply to non-cremated remains)

   Day-old poultry?

   Live animals other than day-old poultry? (Some restrictions)

   Tardigrades? (No restrictions)

 

There are instructions. Cremated remains, it says here, must be affixed to all sides of the package. I am assuming they mean stickers saying cremated remains, but in the event, I do have a glue-stick.

 

Day-old poultry. What exactly is poultry, anyway? Poultry refers to domestic birds kept for meat, eggs, or feathers. So it's a nomenclature of exploitability and Linnaeus had nothing to say about it. Examples could include chickens, geese, swans, emus, or pheasants.

 

You already know about the pheasants.

 

But emus? Who mails day-old emus?

 

The female emu lays huge green eggs and then goes away because she can't even with those eggs. The male emu, unlike most other birds, has a big shlorpy penis and totally pays for it. He has to sit on the eggs for eight weeks, turning them carefully ten times a day, and does not eat during that time. He survives only on stored body fat while brooding the eggs. Once they hatch, he will stay with the chicks for the next year and a half, teaching them how to hunt. Who mails day-old emu chicks?

 

Adult male emus, that's who.

Crashing Soon Into A House Near You

I hear tell the Postal Service is experimenting with driverless trucks. This is in line with everything else they've tried in the last twenty years. Basically, the Postal Service thinks everything will go a lot smoother if they could just get rid of those pesky employees. A lot of them are unkempt and disheveled and whiney, and virtually all of them want pay, medical insurance and some sort of retirement plan. They're a pretty solid minus for the outfit in all respects except customer service, but the plan is to thin out the customer base too, so it should pencil out.

When I started as a letter carrier in 1977, human beings had their smeary hands pretty much all over the mail distribution process. Every letter got fingered many times by many people; mail got banded out, stuffed into canvas sacks and tossed around; it was efficient, it was accurate, it was extraordinary, really; it turns out the cleverest machine isn't really a match for a postal brain, even one of your lower-quality ones. Kids didn't have asthma or allergies back then either, no doubt on account of the protective influence of mailman germs delivered directly to their doors.

Not now, boy howdy. Your letters get picked up from the mailbox and immediately sluiced into an automated system like pigs in a slaughterhouse, barcoded, scanned, sliced into salami, and shot into the ether, ultimately landing, a bunch of the time, in the correct town and in the care of the correct carrier, a carrier with his pride and joy removed, who is also barcoded, scanned, and remotely monitored for malingering--a recipe for trudging if ever I heard one.

It's a postal manager's dream.

So. Driverless vehicles. This one really is a good idea. This is going to make America a ton safer. Let's start with me. I hadn't been in the force for a month before I hit something with my truck. (It was a house.) Thirty-one experienced years later, with a month to go, I backed into the side door of a parked car. During the intervening years I started out with a half-ton truck with an immovable seat from which I could reach the mailboxes or the brake, but not both at the same time; the good news was this was when I got in the habit of using my seat belt so as to keep from falling out of the window going for a low box. The Jeeps were more compact but you're still basically motoring down the road to the south with your head cranked to the east, reading envelopes off a tray. Once I slid my door open while I was still moving and it flew right off its track and cartwheeled down the street for a half a block. Nobody got clocked that time and I got it hooked back on by myself. Jeep 988 ("The Death Can") died if you let off the gas for one second, so you had to drive it floored with your other foot on the brake. All day.

They tried to get a few more years out of the fleet by painting the trucks white, but they were old and creaky and eventually they replaced them. With exploding Ford Pintos. You could hear the gasoline sloshing ominously below your butt when you came to a stop. Several other iffy brands were trotted out and retired and finally they designed a new truck just for the Postal Service. It had a driver's window and a windshield and a bedazzlement of tiny mirrors. You could see behind the rear bumper by squinting at the top left mirror in the front aimed at the back left mirror, or was it the second-from-the-top? It was safest just to take it really slow in reverse and keep your ears peeled for thumps and screams.

By all means, bring on the driverless truck. Set it at a solid mosey calculated to stop at every house for whatever time Management thinks it should take, and if someone has a question or outgoing mail or something--too bad!

That's all part of the Customer Reduction Plan.

"Screwball Central, How May We Not Be Of Assistance?"

According to news reports, a postal carrier in Columbus, Ohio called a man a homophobic slur and then cut off his mail, as it were. "You homophobic slur!" she almost certainly didn't say. We know what she said. This disturbs me on a couple fronts. Starting with the postal part.

I carried mail for 31 years. The Postal Service, admirably, hires every kind of screwball there is as long as they can read an address, or screwballs with a lot of veteran's-preference-points if they can't. As our friend Stricky used to say, shaking his head at the inane patter du jour, "We've got 'em all down here." And durn near every one of us considered our duty sacred. We even had a name for it: "the sanctity of the mail." So no matter what brand of personal idiocy we subscribed to, we got the mail through.

It's possible this doesn't apply anymore. The job is different. The carriers have bar codes tattooed on their asses during Orientation and are constantly tracked in the system like the letters themselves, which is not a policy designed to elevate morale or foster personal pride or encourage initiative. It encourages trudging, is what it does.

But maybe other things have changed too. Maybe there's some new Religious Jerkwad Freedom Initiative that's allowing letter carriers to discriminate and harass on the basis of the deeply held belief that some people are too icky for mail service.

I watched the video of the carrier in question. It all started when the gentleman tried to reach for his mail when the entire residential gang box was open instead of waiting until he could use his own key. This is a postal no-no. I used to cheerfully remind grabbers that I was so sorry, but I couldn't allow it because of security concerns, which I was sure they'd understand, but I'd be done in a jiffy.

"But you just handed that lady her mail!"

"Yes, but I do know who she is," I'd say, usually without actually adding And she gives me twenty dollars at Christmas time.

But personal animus never entered into it. What I did not do is say "I'll be done in a minute, Spanky Pants, so you can keep your fat pink capitalist hands off those letters, which are my letters until I shut this box, and if you do not take three steps back this instant I'm telling your wife about that little chippy in Accounting, and telling everyone else that you order adult diapers."

Because I am a nice person.

There are a few legitimate reasons to quit delivering your mail. If, for instance, your unrestrained wolf hybrid threatens me, that's it for your grocery circulars and election flyers. Even more fun, I can quit delivering mail for the whole block. That's the trick that usually gets your attention. Unfortunately for me, I'm supposed to deliver a Bad Dog letter to you first, to explain things.

Not sure the Postal Service thought that one through.

So is this incident similar to those poor persecuted bakers who thought making a wedding cake for women was their first station on the train to Gomorrah? Hard to say. If that was an ethical stand, which I contend it was not, this incident falls somewhere below it. This is just an asshole on a power trip. Mail carriers don't have many ways to power-trip, so ripping someone's name off his mailbox and stomping off is about the limit. And it should be a firing offense.

The second thing that was disturbing was that the asshole in this case was a black woman, which goes completely against the narrative. I count on black women to have a much better grip on matters of justice, and although it is never fair to generalize, I'm still disappointed. If some representative of the Postal Service is going to go rogue like that, I want that person to be a recognizable deplorable of some kind. Any of your standard villains. Or at least a man.

Red, White, Blue, and Dust-Colored

So they're going to redesign the Postal Vehicles again. Probably a good idea. Mail carriers deliver mostly packages now and their vehicles are set up to deliver antique letter mail from twenty years ago. But they used to change the vehicles every now and then just to rattle the crew.

I personally preferred the ones we started with in the '70s. They were little right-hand-drive Jeeps and you could reach everything you needed from the front seat without dislodging a butt cheek. Each one had its own idiosyncrasies. If you were a lowly sub, you'd get to choose something particularly quirky from the bottom tier of the fleet. It took a certain amount of mental agility to switch from the one with the window that wouldn't go down to the one where you had to stand on the gas and the brake at the same time to modulate your speed. I hadn't been working there too long before the day I tried to save time by sliding open my door as I was coasting up to a stop, and it slid clear off its rails and cartwheeled down the street behind me. Fortunately no bystanders got decapitated but I do remember looking in my rear-view mirror and thinking: even without a decapitation event, this isn't ideal. I could probably get in trouble for this. But I backed up, hauled the door off the pavement, and stuck it back on the rails good as new, making a mental note that Jeep 998 is the one where you have to be careful of the door, and if I had a choice, I'd try to get the one where the engine didn't turn off even when you took the key all the way out. Because that one had a stellar emergency brake.

A tidy bunch

Big change after the first couple years. The Jeeps were repainted WHITE red and blue from the former BLUE red and white. The extra paint gave the rivets a little more integrity. We got used to the white. Everyone liked to use Route 532's Jeep because the carrier, a neat dresser with aviator shades and a lounge-lizard beard, had it tricked out with wall-to-wall carpeting. For me, it didn't make up for the cigar stench or the fug from the pine-tree deodorizer.

The Jeeps were troublesome but entirely too useful and soon enough we had them all swapped out for Ford Pintos. The big hump running down the middle for the power train proved to be a pain in the ass to arrange mail trays around, but worse, Pintos were already famous for blowing up whenever someone tapped them on the rear bumper, which is probably why the Postal Service got them cheap. And whenever we drove them up to a stop sign, we could hear an ocean of fuel sloshing back and forth underneath us like an ominous tide. It was like straddling a low-tech rocket. For the first time, we had three-point seat belts, too, so we wouldn't be able to bail out immediately when we were set on fire. Nobody missed them when they were towed away.

A few forgettable station wagons (K-Car? Aerostar?) were trundled out and abandoned and then they

came up with the first vehicle specifically designed for us, and not whacked together out of an existing fleet with extra trays bolted on. The LLV was supposed to last for twenty years, and maybe it would under the care of someone who had purchased it for personal use, but the best of us sought only to keep the daily damage to a minimum. The LLV required actual training to operate. It was an opaque box. There would be no looking over your shoulder to back up. Instead, it was decked out with dozens of mirrors on all corners, some of which were aimed at other mirrors so that you could make out what you were about to back into, as long as you knew which mirror to check and as long as it wasn't raining; and some of the mirrors were purely there for extra jazz. Most of us were never sure if we were looking at traffic coming up on our left, traffic behind us, or a video of little toy cars. We each had half-day training on the LLVs and were pronounced good to go as soon as we could drive five minutes without crushing an orange cone.

Within a few months all the predictable problems were solved by a new edict from Management that we were no longer allowed to put our vehicles in reverse. This meant we couldn't get in or out of the garage. The edict was altered slightly so that you could put your vehicle in reverse if no one was watching, but if you hit something, it was totally your fault because they warned you.

These are the vehicles that are being phased out now. The new ones will allow you to stand up in the back and have lots of room for packages. The mirror situation probably won't have improved. If you have to track the trajectory of your sliding door as it goes sailing down the street now, you're probably out of luck.