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….