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.

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.