A couple of weeks ago we linked to a column in the Reading, Pennsylvania Eagle entitled “The claim is in the mail“, which told the story of how the writer, Beth Nauss, had trudged down to the PO to file an insurance claim, only to be thwarted by lazy postal workers. Beth is billed as the Eagle’s “humor” columnist- here’s an example of the “humor” from that column:

The system works like this. Buy a wonderful gift that’s worth more than 10 cents for someone who lives far away from you. Wrap it carefully in a crush-proof container. Then, while under the influence of prescribed medications, decide sending the gift through the U.S. mail is a better idea then soaking it in meat juice before tossing it to a pack of hungry lions.

You get the idea.

After the column was linked to by this and other web sites frequented by postal workers, Beth apparently started getting comments that were less than appreciative of her sense of humor. She responded on Sunday with more of her trademark wit:

I stand corrected on several key points. First, the USPS does not soak packages in meat juice. Then they do not throw them to a pack of hungry lions. The USPS, in fact, does not really have any lions at your local post office. The lions are at the zoo. The postal service no longer has any lions because it switched to elephants in a cost saving measure adopted in 1978. The USPS discovered that elephants are much more efficient at processing fragile packages, and besides, they’re willing to work for peanuts.

And so on. If you really feel like suffering, you can read the whole sorry mess here.

In Beth’s defense, though, I’d like to vouch for the fact that Beth can be funny: here’s the email Beth sent to our feedback address after we linked to her article:

From Beth Nauss
to feedback10@postalnews.com,
date Dec 18, 2007 1:14 AM

12/18/07

Hello!

I doscovered that you reproduced material on your website to which I hold the copyright and you did so without my permission. Please delete the link and the material immediately and contact me.

Thank you.
Beth Nauss

Apparently Beth hadn’t realized that when she clicked on the headline at postalnews.com, she was taken to the Reading Eagle web site. (You’d think the big logo and even bigger picture of herself might have been a tipoff, but apparently not.)

And then it dawned on me: Beth was just cracking another of her wonderful jokes! It was that trademark “humor”!

So I played along, “humorously” pointing out to Beth that I didn’t own the Reading Eagle web site, and that if she really didn’t want people to read her columns, she really needed to the people who kept posting them on the Reading Eagle web site!

Beth must have laughed until she cried at that one! And maybe that’s why I haven’t heard back from her?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 6:40 am and is filed under newspapers, postal, stupidity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.