…Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There’s never a letup. It’s relentless. Every day it piles up more and more, but the more you get out, the more it keeps coming. And then the bar code reader breaks. And then it’s Publisher’s Clearinghouse day. 

Greatest Fictional New Yorkers #12: Newman

Meanwhile, we seem to be either shooting ourselves in the foot when we deal with postal reform in DC, or burying our head in the sand when it comes to dealing with plant consolidations in the field. Why can KFOX in El Paso say that they’ve waited months for someone from the El Paso Post Office to talk to them? Why can Senator Harkin complain that we won’t tell him what our plans are for Sioux City? Why are we letting the mailers, unions, and politicians do all the talking?

Why are we wasting our time going postal over “going postal” when there are more important things to worry about?

When a journalist for Germany’s Deutsche Welle network attempted to videotape people queueing up to get their mail, he was told by postal police to leave the premises. He complied, but continued taping through a fence. The cops again told him to stop taping. When the journalist objected, pointing out the lack of signs indicating the area was in any way restricted, he was told to hand over his videotape. When he refused, he was handcuffed. He wasn’t released until he finally agreed to hand over the video.

The punch line?

The reporter says that at least twice, one of the cops told him ”that in the past, I would have gotten away with [filming] but not now with the ‘war on terror’“.

U.S. Postal Service detains journalist, keeping his videotape 

It’s hard to believe an actual postal worker ever thought this was funny- but to see something like this around after last week’s events is pretty sad.

Source: Flickr

A Google news search for ‘going postal’ the day after the incident turned up a large number of hits, but the vast majority came from an Associated Press story that was carried on many sites, often more than once as it was updated with new developments. The AP dispatches mention, fairly deep in the story, that a series of killings in the 80’s gave rise to the phrase.

One version of the AP story says “The term has been part of popular culture since 1986″, which is not true. In fact, it was not until well into the 90’s that the phrase started appearing in print. The first citation I could find was in December 1993, in a newspaper article describing a symposium on workplace violence sponsored by the postal service. A couple of months later, it showed up in an issue of Wired magazine, in the ‘Jargon Watch’ section. That lends some credence to the idea that the first use of the phrase was among techies on the Well, the pioneering online discussion forum, and then spread to Usenet, the loose network of discussion groups that pretty much WAS the Internet in the days before the World Wide Web. (Yes kids, there was a time before the web!) A search of the Google Usenet archives dates the online use of the phrase to February 15, 1994, when it was used to describe a shooting at a Wendy’s. The fact that it was included in ‘Jargon Watch’ is an indication that it was not in widespread use. And it was not a ‘postal massacre’ that made ‘going postal’ a common expression, but the 1995 film ‘Clueless’.

Back to the media: most of the network and cable news reports reviewed were very respectful, and a text search of transcripts turned up no instances of ‘going postal’ or its variants. Instead of rolling out the stereotypes, the reports mostly just accurately portrayed the shock and sadness. Kyra Phillips of CNN closes out one report with “…make a point to honor the five employees that were killed” before reading the names of the employees. Wolf Blitzer says “… our prayers go out. I hope she’ll recover…” after a story on the sixth victim, who at the time was still clinging to life.

There were two examples of postal stereotyping that merit a brief mention- one from a traditional media outlet, the other from a political blog.

The media example is TV station KESQ in Palm Springs. The version of the story posted online starts out:

“Scenes like the one in Goleta bring to mind the pop culture term “going postal.” Just why do our mail carriers kill? NewsChannel 3 went looking for answers about why so many postal employees “go postal.”

And goes downhill from there. No facts, obviously, to support the assertion that “so many” postal employees are killers. (And don’t even bother to tell them that the Goleta incident did not involve ‘mail carriers’.)

The punch line? After a slapdash piece with absolutely no “facts”, frightening or otherwise, the “reporter” reaches the breathless conclusion that “Despite the frightening facts, many postal employees believe the violence has more to do with the individual rather than where they work.”

Imagine that?

There were actually quite a few blogs that had references to “going postal” shortly after the killings took place, but most were from the kind of blogs that make Howard Stern look witty and urbane. The one that surprised me was a posting on TPM Cafe, the companion blog to Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, a leading liberal blog. Let me stipulate that my political opinions are very similar to TPM’s- however:

TMP’s Matthew Yglesias responded to the cold blooded murder of six innocent human beings with this:

“It’s not really funny, but then again it sort of is funny, when a “former postal employee” lives up to stereotype with a little spree killing action, “killing six people and critically wounding another before committing suicide.” It’s enough to make you wonder if there might be some factual basis to the notion that postal workers are unusually likely to go on a rampage (recall that Newman on Seinfeld explained that this happens “because the mail never stops”). Perhaps Mark Kleiman, the blogosphere’s resident criminologist, can enlighten us. While we’re waiting he has a post on a more serious crime control issue that’s worth a read.”

So six people being murdered is ’sorta funny’? Can you imagine the convulsions of laughter he must have gone through on 9/11? But never mind those wacky postal people dying- read up on “a more serious crime control issue”.

This from a guy who claims to have a Harvard degree in philosophy, and to have written for the New York Times. We’ll leave Matty with the comment one of his own readers posted: “Matt, there’s a certain variety of humor which works when wisecracking with your friends, but makes you look really, really bad when it is forever enshrined in the google cache. Making light of mass-murder pretty clearly falls into that category.”

Those two glaring, but thankfully low circulation examples aside, it does seem that as Bill Burrus said the other day, “by and large, the press has not used this terrible event to portray all postal employees as violent and that the media has refrained from using the term “going postal” in relation to this tragedy.”

Lets hope it continues.

Our brains and our hearts can’t handle this kind of sudden senseless loss. We feel the need to search for a reason behind it. Was there something wrong in that facility? Does it prove that there really is something to the phrase ‘going postal?

I don’t know what might have triggered the tragedy, and neither does anyone else right now. I have the feeling, deeply unsatisfying as it may be, that it really was simply a senseless, horrible tragedy. We will find out more as the investigation develops, and we can only hope that we will learn things that will make us safer, even if we never get the answer to the nagging question: why?

As far as the ‘going postal’ business is concerned, I’m afraid it is back for a while. There’s no reason for it, of course. At least no rational reason. In 2000, the Califano Commission studied the perception that postal workers were prone to violence, and found that they were statistically no more likely to attack their co-workers than the average American. (While it has been 6 years since the report was issued, remember that there had not been any further ‘postal’ incidents until last night.)

That makes it hard to take the casual comments like this from today’s LA Times story, calling the killings “the latest in a string of shootings over the past decades that have made the phrase ‘going postal’ a synonym for murderous anger”.

According to the Associated Press, the last so-called ‘postal’ murder was eight years ago. It involved a Dallas postal employee who killed a co-worker after they had an argument. To the LA Times, that is a ’string’.

There are about as many postal employees as there are residents of Austin, Texas. Last year there were 27 murders in Austin. Austin is considered an exceptionally safe city by American standards. (Houston is three times as big, but had over thirteen times as many homicides). Including last night’s killings, you would have to go back 15 years to get to the same number of murders among postal employees as occurred in a single year in safe, quiet Austin.

That doesn’t help much in making sense of what happened in Goleta. Nothing will. But I take some comfort in knowing that the community I work in is really not so different than the rest of America whether you’re from  Austin, Boston or Santa Barbara. We’re just 700 thousand or so normal, ordinary Americans. We will be hurting from this for some time- but we will get through it.