Over 50, Still Kickin'

A slightly skewed perspective on life in The Middle Ages

I asked my husband if I could tell any of his supervisor frustration stories. He was delighted with the idea and gave me the green light, so here goes. If you are a letter carrier, you will sympathize and maybe smile. If you are a postal supervisor, you might get upset (probably because you need to lighten up). I'm serving notice to all postal supervisors reading this right now: do yourself a favor and just stop reading. (I know you're curious, and you won't be able to stop yourself, though.)

In the Postal Service, everything runs by statistics created by an army of bean counters somewhere up the line in the bureaucracy. There are whole offices of highly paid people who spend their entire lives figuring out ways to save five minutes here and there. Forget what is practical; if a bean counter says you can save 2.8 minutes a week by doing such-and-such a task a little differently, you're going to do it the new way, whether it works or not. Never mind that implementation of the new procedure will waste many hours as everyone retrains. Six months down the road a new batch of bean counters will reassess the situation, and they will come up with a brand new way of doing things -- which will actually turn out to be the way you were doing it before they changed it in the first place. In thirty years at the P.O. Paul noticed a pattern of doing things in cycles -- new way, 'nuther way, then back to the original way, in an unending spin.

But I said we would discuss supervisors and their foibles, not bean counters, didn't I. Some letter carriers are more ambitious than others. They want to move upwards in the system. They no longer want to take orders; they want to give them. I understand. It is always more fun to squash bugs than to be bugs that are squashed.

There are advantages and disadvantages to becoming a supervisor. The biggest advantage is ... um ... is there one? Oh, yes. The bug squashing. Forgot that for a moment. The biggest disadvantage is that supervisors must have "the operation." All the letter carriers at Paul's office knew about the operation, and they asked each other if so-and-so had had it yet. According to Paul, it is a lobotomy (surgical removal of part of the brain). I suppose this is why many of the carriers-turned-supervisors have grave personality changes. When Alice Cooper sang No More Mr. Nice Guy, what he was really singing about was postal supervisors. You didn't know that, did you? Now you do. Add it to your trivia collection.

The lobotomy may also be why supervisors get excited about insignificant things. Brain damage does that to a person. Example: the carrier who was suspended for two weeks for throwing a gum wrapper in the regular trash, instead of depositing it in the paper recyclables during the "We can save America through recycling" campaign.

Paul was once reprimanded for walking back and forth between his work case and his truck one too many times. Twice is allowed, but three times is not, because it WASTES TOO MUCH TIME! (He had too many parcels to make it in two trips.) It may take an extra couple of minutes to walk that third time. (Never mind that the meeting to discuss it took twenty minutes.) Going to the restroom too many times may get one in trouble, too. Not going to the restroom often enough may pose a different set of problems, however. And taking fifteen seconds to rip off a piece of tape and hang a picture on one's case will merit another twenty minute conference. Accidentally missing one bar code scan out of many required in a week's time out on the route is a serious offense. It could bring about suspension. Not that anyone knows what they do with the info from those scans (other than that it gives the bean counters more statistics to manipulate). These are just a few of the very, very serious infractions that letter carriers must be constantly vigilant to avoid perpetrating -- honest!

If you work for the Postal Service, you should inform all your friends and relatives that they must not die while you are on duty. When Paul's mother passed away, I called his office, and asked the supervisor to have someone find him on his route and send him home. She asked, "Can't it wait until he is done for the day?" I assured her it most certainly could not, and that she'd better go get him and do it pronto!

On the whole, Paul managed to get along pretty well with his supervisors, whether they were exasperating, incomprehensible, and unreasonable or not. (Are you getting a feel for this?) He learned that sometimes making a funny comment about whatever situation he was being chastised for, or reminding them to take a deep breath and put their life in perspective, would disarm them and make them forget why they had their blood pressure up. That worked for the minor stuff, but not the really, really serious items, like the fifteen-second taping-up-a-picture exploit.

On the Serious Side

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