When working at the post office, paradoxes bloom up like algae as far as your bloodshot eyes can see. For example, the postal service seems to be a benign, compassionate master, employing all manner of scofflaw as well as a choice assortment of people with pronounced mental disorders (including me). As one old-timer told me, “If you’re not crazy already, you soon will be.”

Conducting your business (processing the goddamn mail!) here is kind of like living in a giant pinball machine. There are forklifts and mules screaming down every alley, and if you happen to be pushing an OTR full of Eddie Bauer catalogues, you’d best get the hell out of the way. And those dudes (and many women) really enjoy laying on the horn! I’ve already had a vivid nightmare about being chased around by a panzer division of beeping, honking postal vehicles.

What I’m trying to say is that this shit is plenty dangerous, and I’m not as spry as I used to be. I’ve already seen a horribly gashed hand (stitches), a smashed finger in a mail carrier door (it took 10 seconds to get the door open again, and the guy was screaming the whole time), and another fellow carted out on a stretcher. “That’s Bob Hobbs, the ol’ chicken scratcher,” said Harry, one of approximately 22 co-workers. “That’s like the seventh time he’s gone out like that.”

“Holy shit! Why doesn’t he retire?”

“He needs the money. Who doesn’t?”

Harry is an LD (light duty) guy who stands by one of the main loader belts, ostensibly to scan tracking labels. Mainly what he does is ask you weirdly personal questions about where you’re from and what you do. When I told him I was a Film Studies major and had worked as a movie reviewer from time to time, he FOLLOWED me around for 40 minutes telling me about a script he wrote for a class. In 1978. It’s about an evil hitchhiker who kills people. Like in that Rutger Hauer movie that came out in 1986. Harry figures that someone in his class stole his idea and went to Hollywood with it and made “like a couple million bucks.” He is clearly haunted.

Harry is probably an old union guy. While I’ve always been vociferously pro-union, I have, to my chagrin, subsequently discovered that (some, not all) old union guys don’t have to do jack shit, and there’s not much you can do about it. On the one hand, I’m happy to observe that the union (there’s actually three postal unions) takes care of its own. On the other, it means I have to work roughly three times harder because some of the people working around me are “tits on a boar hog” useless, or worse, prone to getting in the way.

At the post office, the competent folks (i.e., three-digit IQs with reasonably strong backs) really have to bust ass to help their less gifted and less-motivated comrades, otherwise, we’re looking at consecutive 12-hour shifts. I did four of those in a row this week, and there are plenty more on the horizon. Mainly, we all just want to get home and sleep. I know I do.