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.

Look At The Articles On That One

You've heard about the Sun tabloid kerfuffle. The Sun is one of those British newspapers with giant print and giant celebrity heads on the cover page and maybe a giant headline involving one of the celebrity heads and a hamster. It's popular. For over forty years now it has also featured a girl on Page Three with no top on. A woman girl--not a girl girl.

I don't know if the Page Three girls get paid or are just in it for the exposure. I'd be sorry if they don't get paid even a little, because that would make them no better than writers and musicians, who can't give their stuff away fast enough these days. But, in either case, there seems to be no shortage of willing Page Three girls, and roughly twice that many titties. It's been a working franchise.

Lots of people have been upset about Page Three over the years, because it objectifies women. So when The Sun suddenly up and stuffed a Page Three girl into a bikini recently, it was a huge deal. Feminists declared a victory of sorts. I'm not especially persuaded, myself. If a bikini is that much of an improvement, it's kind of saying that it's all about the nipple. As though nothing would restore a woman's dignity more expeditiously than a nice set of pasties. At any rate, a few days later the bluff was over and the topless Page Three girl was back, winking. It was all a big tease.

Americans are weirdly prudish about sexual displays. We like to keep all that business under the counter where there's no chance anyone will become inured to it. When I started out as a letter carrier, Playboy magazine and its competitors came in a plain brown wrapper so as not to unduly arouse the subscriber's children, or mailman. The plain brown wrapper was open on either end, and proved to be one bit of technology that was easily overcome, even by employees of the Postal Service. At some point I guess enough subscribers complained about their magazines being delivered with the best pages stuck together that they switched over to a sealed black plastic wrap.

America's Finest

This was a sad day in post offices across America. All that the American mailman had left to look forward to was the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition and its coincidental one-day bump in overtime statistics.

As a ploy to sell a guaranteed number of newspapers, though, it's hard to beat the Page Three girl. Our own local newspaper could profit from the idea. They couldn't have any toplessness--this is America, after all--but surely they could rig something up with strategically placed graphics and sidebars. They already have plenty of graphics and sidebars to spare; they use them to keep the news tidbits from bumping into each other and inadvertently forming an in-depth article.

At any rate, although I am surely a feminist, I tend to regard this squabble over the nudity as something of an antique concern. We were pretty upset about the objectification of women in the '70s, particularly in advertising, but things have improved a lot since then. (Now we objectify everybody.) I get more worked up about conditions for women in Africa and the Middle East and stuff like that. Maybe The Sun can come up with a fresh ploy. Mix it up. Maybe on alternate days, page three can feature pictures of moist layer cake. Maybe they can carefully hide two verifiable items in their regular reportage and challenge alert readers to Find The Facts. Or maybe just keep the titties on page three and the dicks on the masthead.

What's My Line?

One of the cool things about the olden days was that if someone told you what he did for a living, you knew what it was. You had your butcher, your baker, your candlestick-maker. Occupations started to get more obscure when I was a kid and now it's all out of control. I have no idea what anyone's doing.

When I was growing up in the humid shadow of the nation's capital, if anyone asked me what my daddy did, I said "he works for the government." Everyone else in my class did, too. There would be a few whose dads were in the military and their kids knew their ranks and stuff. The rest of us really didn't have a clue, nor did we much care. Daddy went off in the bus at seven and as long as he came home in time to carve the meatloaf and dish up the green bean bake, that was all we needed to know. There's evidence that I didn't even know everything my mom did, even though she did it right there at home. At least, by the time I'd gone to college, it would appear I believed in laundry fairies.

When I got into my teenage years I knew enough to say "my father is a statistician for the Veterans' Administration." Sometimes I'd say "mathematician" because it sounded smarter. But still, to this day, I do not know exactly what he did every day when the bus dumped him off in D.C. There's something about people being dead and gone that makes you suddenly way more curious about them than you were when they were around to answer questions.

I did not contribute to the general obfuscation about jobs. I was a mailman. Everyone knows just what that is. Most people think it's sort of cute.

Spanky Grommet Flapper

But now someone can tell me what she does for a living and I'm right back to being clueless. You ask a young person today what she does and she gives you her job title, sometimes a job description, and then she might follow up with a snappy, self-deprecating bon mot. My friend Munny, for example, is an Associate Consultant at Pivot Leadership. "I'm the associate consultant responsible for program implementation from project pitch through program delivery," she'll explain.

All I know from that is that candlesticks are not involved. "I support operations for the grommet synchrony module," she might as well have said, adding, with a chuckle, "basically, I'm a spanky grommet flapper." And everyone in the room smiles and nods and someone remarks that you can't swing a dead cat around here without smacking a spanky grommet flapper. Merriment ensues. Someone eventually notices my blank look and wonders if I need to have the explanation drawn on my forehead with a crayon.

I used to stick letters through holes in people's houses. That's right. Ask me what a letter is all you want, kids--I'm not telling.