the good old days

Today i was delivering to a house that was having a garage sale. while looking around for some treasure, a woman approached me and said " I have to talk to you.. my dad was a mailcarrier way back in the day." According to his daughter he loved his job. She said he was movie star gorgeous, and the women would wait for him and some came to the door naked! (Now we know
one reason why he loved his job.) In 20 years I only remember one scantily clad customer..a college kid with a towel around his waist that invited me in for coffee. A couple of my female co-workers have had some screwballs expose themselves. Somehow it just doesn't seem quite as glamourous as this lady's dad 's encounters "back in the day". By the way, am I the only one that finds it a little odd that her old school father shared this info with her ?
I'm trying to picture myself sitting around the dinner table with my kids and husband..." So how was your day honey?" "Oh, you know, same old same old...lots of parcels, my boss was on my ass again and another buck naked customer came to the door."

And Toto too ?

I've got two words to sum up today's story from the route. AUNTIE EM !
I knew a storm was coming..could see it developing off to the west for at least an hour before it hit....but man did that thing HIT ! There was stuff flying everywhere..(except for my mail which i had a death grip on as i ran for the safety of the truck). The wind was so forceful it felt like the truck might get flipped.
At the time I was petrified. In retrospect it was cool.
One regret: a house didn't fall from the sky and land on Ms. Ribble. Guess that stuff only happens in the movies.

when animals attack...feline edition

when I inherited this route back in May, the previous carrier alerted me to some potentially bad situations that i might encounter. Things like: which customers are frequent P.I.A's , which lawns not to walk across etc. He also wrote up Dog Warning cards ...which are required for each job...and one Cat Warning card. This particular cat had some sort of history of clawing at the mailcarrier as he tried to put the mail through the door slot.
i'll admit right now that i didn't take the warning too seriously. How badly could a little pussycat hurt a tough mailgal like myself ?
Unfortunately, i found out the answer to that question today, and the answer is VERY badly.
That sucker got his claw in me and would not let go. I was SCREAMING like a crazy person. Seriously, it brought back memories of childbirth. Not good.
There was blood everywhere. unbelievable.
to make matters worse, i had to report it to my boss, and report to the medical unit when i returned from my route. i acted like it was no big deal...but secretly i'm wondering if i'm going to come down with some weird cat scratch fever thing that will be the end of me.

happy anniversary to me

I forgot to mention that last wednesday was my 20 year postal anniversary.
In theory, that would mean 20 down and ten to go.
Unfortunately the year that I'm eligible to retire is the same year that my youngest son enters college.
guess that means 20 down, 14 to go.
Twenty years in should merit some kind of booty..a pin, a t-shirt, free stamps, a slap on the back..something. What really happened was I went to the bakery and ordered a cake for myself and a co-worker that shares my anniversary date. That's the reality of the P.O...gotta make it happen yourself.

Food for thought

To offset the pulic's impression of us as a bunch of stark raving lunatics, we do a yearly Food Drive to help fill the local food pantries for the summer months. In the past we have scratched our collective heads over some of the items left for us to pick up....half -eaten boxes of cookies..canned goods with an expiration date of 1995.. caviar....the list goes on and on.

This year's bizzare food drive item wins the all-time prize.. a set of milk chocolate handcuffs ! Try as we might, we could not figure this one out. " Let's see...a can of tuna? No, we gave that last year. How about the chocolate handcuffs? What do ya think honey??

What the hell are they going to put out for us tomorrow..edible underwear?

forget sleet..what about heat?

Who is responsible for penning the postal motto about Rain, sleet, snow and hail ? In my humble ( but nonetheless correct) opinion it needs to be amended to read: Rain , HEAT, snow and dogs.
How often does it actually SLEET ? Almost never. Heat is the true enemy of mail carriers.
Most people ask " How do you do it in the winter..delivering in the snowdrifts and freezing weather?". When it's cold we put on more clothes..lots and lots of strategic layers of wonderfully effective hi-tech gear.
The problem comes when it's hotter than hell..we can't very well take our clothes off. We can't put our underwear in the freezer the night before. We just have to kind of suck it up. Slam on the safari hat, and hope for a breeze. We also hope that absolutely no one asks " Is it hot enough for you?" and pray that many people will take pity on us and invite us in for something to drink. ( One time an elderly couple asked me in for a glass of lemonade and somehow I wound up on a 15 minute tour of their house which found me jammed inside their walk-in closet with the wife's lingerie two inches from my face..but that's another story).
Drinking plenty of fluids... means 8 glasses a day, right ? Not if you're out on your route and it's 90 degrees .
Then it's about 8 glasses every ten minutes. Weird stuff happens to your brain if you don't drink enough. Yesterday, after many hours in the sun with no break, no breeze and insufficient water intake, my mind started playing tricks on me. Driving to deliver the last street on my route, I saw something outside of my vehicle, smushed on the road. It was a road kill for sure, but to me, in my severely dehydrated delirium, I SWORE it was a dead baby pig..here comes the weird part...WITH WINGS. I was so sure about it that i almost turned the truck around to get a second look. Made me think about the expression.." when pigs fly".
Obviously, this one tried and it didn't work out so well.
Most people get wacked out when they drink too much. Guess the same thing can happen when you don't drink enough...

pump up the volume

there is this one gal on my route. i don't want to call her a first class bi-otch, so let's just be kind and say that she seems to be missing the pleasantness gene.
no matter how friendly i am, she greets me with the same pissed off look on her face.
the only time she actually spoke to me, she "congratulated" me for "breaking the record "for delivering her mail later than ANY other carrier. Wow! Only three weeks on the job and i'm already rewriting the record book. Aren't I something!
Foolishly, i tried to explain that i had delivered the route backwards to avoid getting stuck on her street during the mobfest that was her neighborhood garage sale. she was not buying it.
obviously, there was NO acceptable excuse for my tardiness.
i temporarily pondered " congratulating" her for being THE most miserable customer i had EVER dealt with in my 20 years in the P.O. but instead, held my tongue and went along my merry way wondering what would cause someone to become such a bitter pill.
a couple days ago i was listening to a talk show on NPR while delivering the mail near her house. as usual, i had the volume on my transistor at a politely low setting. the show was an interview with an author that was plugging her new book about happiness. it was very engrossing. as i approached Ms. Ribble's house, i reflexively thought about turning the volume down as i always do when in her yard so as to avoid her wrath. this woman definitely does not need one more thing to be annoyed by.
my finger was on the volume control. her front door was open. the author was hitting a fevered pitch about the importance of finding some sort of happiness in life.... how it doesn't have to be elusive. I turned the volume UP. it was for her own good. then i walked on. feeling happy.