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....