Mail Crawl
Jan. 26th, 2007 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
Dear Postmaster,
Thank you for your note. No winter in this hellhole would be complete without a snotty letter from the Useless Post Office about how to shovel snow from around my mailbox. Trust me, the experience just wouldn't be the same without your particular contribution to the general misery.
I might humbly propose that part of the problem rests with the letter carrier. I'm sure a Geo Metro is a fine little hunk of cheap tin in its own way, and at 60 miles per gallon it must make her a FORTUNE in mileage reimbursment. However, it seems to me that a three-cylinder wheezer that weighs about twelve pounds and doesn't have enough ground clearance to drive over top of a cue ball without getting hung up is PROBABLY not the best vehicle for winter in a town where you get twenty feet of snow a year. In fact, I can't think of a worse winter vehicle for here, except maybe a skateboard.
Since you have told me how to do my job, I will dare to tell you how to do yours. Your job is to put the mail in the mailbox. I don't care if you have to actually stick your delicate, flower-scented hands out the window of the car into the cruel, cold winter air to do it. You're asking me to get a heart attack shoveling every speck of snow down to bare pavement for twenty feet on each side of the blasted mailbox; you can damned well risk chapped hands, as far as I'm concerned.
Besides, I AM shoveling out the mailbox. I do it every night. You want to blame someone for the snow piled around it, don't blame me. Blame Clem and Bubba from the Road Commission. They're the ones who come by in their nuclear-powered Snowplow from Hell and scrape up a wall of ice and pavement chunks in front of my box-- when they're not actually smashing everyone's mailboxes with the plow, which is another issue.
Let's see whether you have learned this lesson correctly.
1. Your job is to:
a. Sit inside and refuse to deliver mail at all on chilly days
b. Write snotty letters about shoveling snow
c. PUT THE MAIL IN THE MAILBOX.
2. When confronted with snow around the mailbox, you should
a. Write snotty letters
b. Go down to Arlene's and slap Clem and Bubba on the back because they did such a good job giving you an excuse not to earn your pay today
c. PUT THE MAIL IN THE MAILBOX.
3. If you have to stick your hand out the window more than six inches to deliver the mail, you should
a. Refuse to do it
b. Throw the mail into the snowbank
c. PUT THE DAMNED MAIL IN THE DAMNED MAILBOX.
If you have any intelligence at all, the answers to the above questions should be obvious.
Winter is tough. Please don't make it any harder. Remember that summer will come, even here, sooner or later. And if it comes on a weekend this year, let's have a picnic.
Sincerely,
Hafoc
Thank you for your note. No winter in this hellhole would be complete without a snotty letter from the Useless Post Office about how to shovel snow from around my mailbox. Trust me, the experience just wouldn't be the same without your particular contribution to the general misery.
I might humbly propose that part of the problem rests with the letter carrier. I'm sure a Geo Metro is a fine little hunk of cheap tin in its own way, and at 60 miles per gallon it must make her a FORTUNE in mileage reimbursment. However, it seems to me that a three-cylinder wheezer that weighs about twelve pounds and doesn't have enough ground clearance to drive over top of a cue ball without getting hung up is PROBABLY not the best vehicle for winter in a town where you get twenty feet of snow a year. In fact, I can't think of a worse winter vehicle for here, except maybe a skateboard.
Since you have told me how to do my job, I will dare to tell you how to do yours. Your job is to put the mail in the mailbox. I don't care if you have to actually stick your delicate, flower-scented hands out the window of the car into the cruel, cold winter air to do it. You're asking me to get a heart attack shoveling every speck of snow down to bare pavement for twenty feet on each side of the blasted mailbox; you can damned well risk chapped hands, as far as I'm concerned.
Besides, I AM shoveling out the mailbox. I do it every night. You want to blame someone for the snow piled around it, don't blame me. Blame Clem and Bubba from the Road Commission. They're the ones who come by in their nuclear-powered Snowplow from Hell and scrape up a wall of ice and pavement chunks in front of my box-- when they're not actually smashing everyone's mailboxes with the plow, which is another issue.
Let's see whether you have learned this lesson correctly.
1. Your job is to:
a. Sit inside and refuse to deliver mail at all on chilly days
b. Write snotty letters about shoveling snow
c. PUT THE MAIL IN THE MAILBOX.
2. When confronted with snow around the mailbox, you should
a. Write snotty letters
b. Go down to Arlene's and slap Clem and Bubba on the back because they did such a good job giving you an excuse not to earn your pay today
c. PUT THE MAIL IN THE MAILBOX.
3. If you have to stick your hand out the window more than six inches to deliver the mail, you should
a. Refuse to do it
b. Throw the mail into the snowbank
c. PUT THE DAMNED MAIL IN THE DAMNED MAILBOX.
If you have any intelligence at all, the answers to the above questions should be obvious.
Winter is tough. Please don't make it any harder. Remember that summer will come, even here, sooner or later. And if it comes on a weekend this year, let's have a picnic.
Sincerely,
Hafoc
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-27 07:19 am (UTC)That Clem and Bubba from the Road Commission, as the complainer so nicely put it, were throwing up new snow after he'd shoveled the box out, was not her problem. She put in her hours, collected her contracted pay, and delivered where she could.
Whether she was able to deliver today, or wait until tomorrow, was not her concern.
Later, singing along to the radio (a pop song dating back to an unnameable boy band of the 1970s), she was just pulling up to one of the mail boxes on her rural route, nicely shoveled out, when the snowblower came by. It was running at highway speed, and cut it very close, nearly scraping her car.
She could have sworn that she saw some sort of odd megaphone-like symbol on it just before her vehicle was showered in snow and ice.
A LOT of snow and ice.
The engine promptly died. Her repeated attempts to restart it failed miserably.
So did her attempts to open the doors, now thoroughly blocked by the man-made deluge of winter's wonderment.
Cell phone coverage was at best spotty out here, and this was one of the innumerable "dead zones".
So, she sat, certain that someone would eventually notice the vehicle-shaped snow and ice bank.
Hours later, shivering in the vehicle and the darkness, there was the welcomed sound of a shovel scraping the side of the vehicle, and a small, opening view of the late afternoon sky.
Rolling the window down a short bit, she got a brief look at the tall, heavy-set man with the large shovel, dressed so heavily he looked almost round.
"Have you got my damned mail?!", he asked.
She replied on reflex. "I couldn't put it in the box due to the snow."
With an almost casual flip of the shovel, he recovered the opening to the vehicle and walked away, grumbling.