Chicken or Egg?

Does working at the US Post Office make you mean, or are you hired mean?  The uber requisite on the ideal Post Office employee profile is “Aggrieved Personality.”  The actual mail carriers don’t count.  This characteristic is for the “Customer Service” employee.  The one who acts surprised that people actually come to the desk and have questions or want to mail something.  Cheez.  You think we’d learn.

That fun experience in New York last winter was an anomaly.  In the old days it was fine here in Small Village, New Hampshire.  The PO adjoined Nick’s little store in the center of town and Mrs. Nick was the Postmistress.  He was a retired Massachusetts restauranteur and cooked their dinner in the store to be brought home across the street later.  It smelled really good in the Post Office which closed its window for a couple of hours at noon for them to take a nap.  That was ok because clerk Marion kept stamps in a cigar box at the store counter and was a kind of deputy so that if you really needed a registered letter or something during naptime, she could deliver.

The store is gone and is now a small village equivalent of fancy apartments.  We have a new Post Office (ok it’s been 25 years, but that’s new in New England) with a genuine parking lot even.  I avoid it, but every now and then, like going to the dentist, it is just something you have to do.

So, I was waiting in line with my package and saw a new neighbor who reported that she had received her neighbors’ mail and didn’t get any herself.  The PO “mistress” (term used aptly and not advisedly) snapped,  “Well, they probably got ‘one off’.  It happens and I can’t do anything about it.”  All the time looking at the customer like it was HER fault.  New neighbor mumbled,  “Well, last time you told me to tell you when it happened, not later, so. . . “

I realized that I had only gotten junk mail that day and that’s not usual, so when I got home, I checked and sure enough, the gun catalog I had put in the recycling actually had an address on it~not mine.  I took them their mail and found mine.  I live a couple of miles from the reporting neighbor, so miles of people (at least) were ‘one off’.  You’d think that every once in a while just for the heck of it they’d just kind of check to make sure the mailbox number matched the mail.  That’s a long time of not paying attention.

“Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”  Accuracy?  Not so much.