Contrary to what you may be thinking, this is not going to be a film review of a movie that one of my friends often refers to as "the best porn ever." No, I'll let other people review such scintillating monologues as "The Postman always comes twice!" and "My wife's doing the mailman...I like it again!" Regardless, the topic of today's rant revolves around the most bureaucratic institution of the federal government: the US Postal Service.
The postman may very well come twice. I think they even do in Somerville. But 42 Curtis Street (my humble home) seems to be a black hole of Postal Intelligence. The moment the girl (I have seen her - She is, as far as I can verify, female) walks up to our door, all rational thought is rendered null and void. Speaking of void, that may as well be what lies between her ears. If this girl is the template for the average USPS mail carrier, she has proven that it takes no more than the IQ of a cactus to carry mail. You'd think it wouldn't take much, because all you have to do is sort a little. "Sort" is a word that obviously this girl has never heard of. There are three apartments in the house. Three. All last year, she put every bit of mail for every apartment in our mailbox, thus delegating the sorting task to us. This may seem like a rather intelligent task, but you needn't doubt. She is a moron. Every single mailbox at 42 Curtis has names on it. Most of the mail we receive does not match any of the names on any of the mailboxes. It has been this way for the year and a half I have lived there. Periodically, our lovely carrier will leave notes saying "Does She Still Live Here?" Every time I reply back "The only people who live here are the ones on the boxes" just to make sure she gets it into her pea-sized brain that the ONLY PEOPLE WHO LIVE HERE ARE THE ONES ON THE BOXES!!!! It doesn't seem that hard to grasp, does it?
For aforementioned people not living in our house yet still receiving mail there, we used to be able to write "Forward" on the letters and they would promptly be whisked away into some wonderland of mail sorting and eventually routed to the correct recipient. It seems, with this girl, you have to go to extreme lengths to get her to even notice the enormous "FORWARD" written on each envelope. Many of them have gone weeks without her picking them up. I've resorted to propping them up in odd ways so she is guaranteed to see them when she chucks our (and everyone else's) mail into the box. She still manages to miss them. Someday, I swear, in the not-too-distant future, I'm going to snap and simply ask her to stop sucking so much at a job that even geologic formations can do better than her. Of course then, we won't receive any mail at all.
She is only part of the picture. The one institution in the world that is more bureaucractic than the (former) Soviet socialist government is the USPS. Three weeks ago, my landlord sent to me a large sum of money via certified mail (no, not blood money, rather deposit money). Last week the notice came (amazingly) to our mailbox informing me that I could go to the Post Office to pick it up or sign the back, put the note back out, and have the mail delivered. I was foolish enough to believe that our lovely neanderthal carrier could actually get this task right. So I signed the back, posted the little form, and assumed she would bring the letter back. Two days passed in which she didn't even take the form. Then the form disappeared. I figured "Finally, justice is mine!" A week passed without the letter being delivered. So today I have to take some time from work to go to the post office to get this little letter. But I decided that it would be good to call ahead and see if they could even find this letter. Good news: they can't! I have been ferried (via phone, of course) back and forth between the West Somerville office and the Union Square office, each telling me they can't find it and to go back to the other one. What I wonder is, what the hell is the point of certified mail if no one can find it anyway? The landlord might as well have sent a carrier pigeon, as obviously they have better organizational, navigational, and motor skills than our current mail carrier.
I don't quite understand why postal workers are so disgruntled. Sure it's a shitty job, but it's only shitty because the entire system is so dreadfully inefficient. Do you want to know why it's so inefficient? Even if you don't want to know, obviously I'm going to tell you. It's because the USPS keeps hiring complete GOOMBAHS into its workforce. It's such an obvious example of the lowest common denominator, people. The hive is only as good as the lamest bee. Well that was a crappy analogy, but truly I think the USPS is kind of like an insect hive. Lots of officious, useless, buzzing insects trapped in a gooey, apparently organized mess. The point is, the USPS is only as good as its least intelligent member. Judging from the girl writing "Does he live here?" about someone whose name is clearly written on the mailbox, I can't even imagine what the lowest common denominator of the Postal Service really is. Next time, I'm calling Kevin Costner.