Post Office Characters--Collect Them All #1

I've decided to swerve a bit and take a break from the linear narrative. I encountered a lot of odd people at the Post Office, especially once I got to the mail processing plant where I worked graveyard shift. Here's one of them.

His name was Rex King, so in some ways his name was King King. He was a maintenance mechanic. We had several different machines through which we ran mail. The machines were of various ages, but had one thing in common, they were always breaking down, and when they did,, we had to call an Equipment Technician [or E.T. in postal lingo.] They had varying degrees of expertise. Sometimes it just involved pulling some of the paper residue out of the machine, and sometimes it was more complicated. About six months after I started, they got rid of all the old machines that were probably from the 70s-80s and replaced with a fancy new elaborate flat sorter known as "the 100." It had a conveyor belt, a bunch of flashing lights, and required at least 4 people to operate properly. It was also temperamental as all get out, and would quit working if someone looked at it wrong. So time to call the E.T., which often meant Rex [there was also a gang of three ETs who would occasionally show up, including one of them we called "Gray Sweats" because he always wore the same gray Old Navy shirt and gray sweatpant combination every day, but there was nothing remarkable about him other than that.] There was also Jim the Surly Maintenance Mechanic who swore we were conspiring against him by causing the machine to break at what apparently was the worst possible time for his schedule. but those are pretty much all there are to write about that group.

Rex had a nickname, "the Rexpert." I think he probably was competent enough at fixing the older machines, but could not get his head around the 100, which was way more computerized. If the machine broke down and the Rexpert was up, we were probably going to be down for a while and should start expecting to be sent elsewhere in the facility for a while. One night he had different schematics strewn all over, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. They were supposed to fill out incident reports and I happened to see one of his after a particularly bad breakdown. The last question on the report was "What can be done to prevent this from happening again" and his answer was "No idea."

He was an older guy, with big grey mutton chops and mustache. I ran into him once outside of work, I had the idea that I was going to go to a pancake breakfast one day after work at the Lutheran church down the street. I walk in, and there's the Rexpert, who had put up the flyers at work. So I felt obligated to sit by him for whatever reason, and I awkwardly ate my pancakes while he talks about cults and terrorists [he was interested in that Aum Shinriyiko cult from Japan who had gassed the subways.] As you might guess, conspiracies, cults, guns, and military history were popular topics of conversation among the men of the Post Office, at least at that facility. Once i was in the locker room and saw one of the mail handlers [kind of the Post Office version of longshoremen]reading some kind of John Birch Society newsletter while he was massaging Cornhusker's Lotion into his hands....

"The Benadryl Ain't Workin' (As A Sleep Aid) Anymore

Were I one to write country-western songs, that would be the title of the one I would be writing at this moment.... However, I am not, so there is nothing to do but continue to try to sleep. Good night!

Currently untitled

We excavate
Digging through bones
Shooting pains
from phantom limbs
removed years ago.
We hold tight
Only to let go.

This is part of a slightly longer poem that was published in a zine back in 1995 [I think.] I don't have a copy anymore, and no longer like a lot of it from what I can remember, but I still remembered the lines that I still liked, so I decided to just re-do it [last two lines are new.]

Postal Days, Part 2

The Post Office had its share of characters, even at the encoding center, which I later learned wasn’t the “real” Post office, or at least that’s what the other postal employees thought. As I mentioned, I had a hard time doing much socializing as a young person [I was 24 when I started] due to the work schedule.

Tulsa [where this all happened] was not really a young single person’s town to begin with, and most young people left for greener pastures as soon as they could. Those of us who were stuck there had a tough time unless we got into things like church or country line dancing. Religious types were predominant in Tulsa. Several televangelists were based there, and one of them had a “university” for people who wanted to become ministers themselves. My workplace had a lot of these students, and they would usually try to get you to attend their church or would preach to you. No one did anything about it since it was the Bible belt.

There were also a lot of LGBT employees…that was one thing I did like about the Post Office, it was fairly progressive as far as employing a diverse workforce. One of the associate supervisors was a leather daddy type [I heard later that he’d actually been in leather magazines.] After I’d been there almost a year, I made one friend, a gay woman who was pretty butch. We had similar tastes in books and music, mainly because I liked a lot of women authors. She noticed I was reading Bastard Out of Carolina one day and I guess that made her decide I might be okay. I recently got in touch with her on Facebook after well over a decade. We usually would have new groups of transitional employees starting every so often, and she often would scope out women she found attractive. She seemed to have good instincts for those who might be receptive, for she had several affairs with coworkers while she was there.

There were a lot of single men there, like me, and they would often try to put the moves on new female coworkers, especially the ones that were young. Even the married ones would occasionally try something—one married guy I knew had a massive crush on one young woman [admittedly quite attractive] but he had a creepy sort of awkwardness about it. He would often listen to techno music and bounce up and down in his chair while he typed. People didn’t like to sit next to him due to the distraction. I never really participated in trying to come on to new employees. There was one older punk rock lady who I probably should have gone out with, but I was too chicken and the timing wasn't good.

Until I met my one friend there, I hung out with a group of older women who had all started when I did. I think they kind of saw me as a surrogate son. They were kind and nice to be around, and really funny. One of them, Nancy, was a larger woman who was always complaining about her husband. “One night he just wouldn’t get out of my face and I had to choke him.” We had an employee appreciation day where people brought their families. and I saw the husband, who was a mean looking little man who probably deserved to be choked on a regular basis. Most of them eventually left. The next few years went on pretty much the way I’ve described so far. Steady work from 4-12:30, Monday through Friday. Overtime during the three weeks leading up to Christmas [though I never worked as many hours as I did that first season.] Lots of CDs and books on tape. I remember listening to several John Irving novels on tape, and a lot of john Grisham. Don’t know how many hours of NPR I heard. But as I said, we were a stopgap measure. When I started, there were something 25-30 sites like ours throughout the US. But then the scanning technology got better, and sites started to close. Rumors began going around, and in late 1999, we began facing the inevitable….

Postal Days, Part 1.

And no, I did not have the temptation to name this “Going Postal.”

When I was faltering as an undergrad, at one point my mother said maybe I should drop out of school and try to get a job at the Post Office, because it didn’t seem like school was really helping me with anything. I blanched at that advice, and did manage to graduate [basically a B average student—had no real motivation to do better and only really buckled down if a class interested me] but had no idea what to do after that. After several months of struggle, I enrolled in a paralegal program at a nearby university [also incurring my first student loan, but that’s beside the point.] I then attempted to find a job as a paralegal in different places but it looked like I was about to have still more months of struggle when I saw an ad in the paper for data entry jobs at the Post Office. Guess I could do worse, I thought. I can at least do this until I find something better. It’ll probably only be for a year or so…..

I stayed nearly seven years, working in different capacities. It was my first full-time job.

I worked at a Remote Encoding Center. We existed as a short term solution while technology was being developed. The letter sorting machines could read a lot of typewritten addresses but had trouble with handwritten letters and certain typewritten fonts. As the mail was ran through the machine, it was scanned and the images were sent to us. I’d see a picture of the letter on my screen, I would type some address information [using specialized abbreviations and special keys] and that would tell the machine where the letter was supposed to go.

Through most of my time there, I worked from 4 PM to 12:30 AM, and after a while I got weekends off. I was a “transitional employee” which meant I got a straight hourly wage with no benefits, and I got furloughed for a week every year. They always hired a ton of us transitional employees to gear up for the holidays. We got an ergonomic break every 55 minutes, alternating between 5 and 10 minutes.

In many ways, still the best job I ever had as far as schedule and being able to just work and not have to worry about other people’s problems. I could listen to music or whatever I wanted on my headphones. I listened to so many books on tape from the library, usually mysteries. The more literary stuff I read didn't seem to work on tape for whatever reason. During Christmas time we would work 12 hour days and I’d get off work at 4 AM sometimes. I’d listen to the BBC all night. The first Christmas I didn’t know if they would keep me on after the holiday so I tried to get all the hours I could. I worked 12 hours a day straight for 13 days. I fell asleep in my chair that Christmas when I was visiting my parents.

They did keep me and things were pretty good. I typed [they called it "keying"] quickly and was accurate most of the time. I was always afraid my hours would get cut, but they never did. We even had overtime. I had my week’s furlough but was told to return. I listened to a lot of punk rock CDs and NPR. A lot of the time if I really liked a song I'd put it on repeat. One night I played "From Her to Eternity" for an hour straight. The job had negative parts too, though. The work schedule meant I never could do anything in the evenings, since those were the peak hours for mail in the processing plant. I did get weekends off after a while which helped. Some of the supervisors were hard to deal with, and would make up rules just to show how much control they had over everyone. The job of supervisor wasn’t that demanding, they mainly just sat in the office and looked at the monitors letting them know about the images that were coming in, so there was plenty of time for them to mess with people.

That fall there was big news, the union [which most of us joined] had won a grievance and they were going to have to make several of the transitional employees “regulars,” that is, full time permanent postal employees. It would all be determined by our scores on the exam we took the year before. I kept waiting to see if the supervisor would ever call me into the office, and eventually he did. He was a big guy named Ray with a bouffant haircut and a temper that would get out of control sometimes, though he was good-natured most of the time. He asked if I wanted to be a regular, and I accepted, though it meant I was probably going to be at the Post Office longer than I originally planned...and also not always at this job.

Beans and Tea

We got good at arithmetic
Writing down figures each week
On notepads taken from hotels
Where we’d stayed in better times
Some adding, mostly subtracting
Blackboard equations and formulae
Trying to engineer another week
Our fingers sifting for rocks and hulls


Sitting down to our brown beans and tea
Thinking of the people Grandpa talked about
when he spoke of the Thirties
About people who lived in caves out in the hills


Shopping became simple
We walked past all the bright packages
and only bought in bulk
All we cared about was
Having our beans and tea
and reading our library books

The Cold War Never Really Ended

“The Cold War never really ended”
Said my cousin the Air Force Major
While he drove me from the airport at midnight
to see our dying grandmother back in 2009
I always remember what he said, and wanted to use that line.
A poem about a couple whose words were like skidding on black ice
Public words that encoded private suffering
But the line no longer speaks, or else the world can no longer hear it
And my cousin, now a lieutenant colonel, is soon to retire

The angst lifts....

You get used to everything eventually. I think living in the pandemic situation kind of made me get past a lot of what I was dealing with a lot sooner than it might have otherwise. True, my personal life was in shambles, but so was everyone else's. Everything has slowed down. I feel like it's somewhat easier to get used to being here because nothing is normal, people still aren't around much and it's fairly easy to get around, if you can think of somewhere to go. New job seems to be fairly laid back, though it may be ramping up soon. We'll see how demanding it is. I guess I've worked long enough now to where it doesn't really matter to me that much, or else maybe work problems just seem to be the least of my concerns. Gradually getting to know people online. Maybe the whole forced social isolation thing is working in my favor. I'm an old pro at this.