Despite the dominance of instantaneous e-mail, the U.S. Postal Service isn’t about to follow the Pony Express into oblivion. In fact, I still send an occasional ink-and-paper letter. There’s something about the personal exchange I find warm and appealing. For 43 cents I can hand my letter to postal clerk Mary Grager and one day later another human being will hand it to my friend on the East Coast.
The other day, I joined Mary for a latté at City Perk. I’d heard rumors that a couple of months ago the post office had, for a few minutes, ground to an absolute halt and, thereafter, had to function in a greatly reduced capacity for several days. Mary laughed as she recalled the anecdote.
It was back in December during one of the coldest weeks of this winter. This was a most inopportune time for the furnace to break down, but that’s exactly what happened. Contractual obligations prevented the post office from dealing with a local business for repairs. Instead, a fellow out of Seattle examined the problem and decided he couldn’t fix it, so he called someone else. As it turned out, the furnace was on the fritz for three or four days. During that period, the place was cold as hell and customers humorously complained it was warmer outside.
On day one of this fiasco. Judy Vandam, first-class receptionist at Malneritch Accounting across the street, stood shivering in the post office and volunteered to loan the place a couple electric heaters from her office. Needless to say, the federal employees were very receptive to this idea. So Judy carried one of the heaters across Cole Street, plugged it in behind the post office counter and everyone was quite delighted with the results. Judy returned to her bailiwick and got the second heater. However, when this one was activated it tripped an electrical breaker and all the power in the post office went off. But the problem was quickly solved and soon both heaters were running, which at least made conditions for the employees behind the counter a bit more tolerable, though it did little to improve the chill suffered by customers. Unfortunately, after the second heater was activated, two of the computers crashed, which only left one functioning machine to serve the flood of Christmas business.
The furnace was finally repaired. However, it took several more days to get the computers back on line because, of course, the post office couldn’t use local businesses, owing again to contractual obligations, this time with engineers in Raleigh, N.C. (And you can surmise how efficient such long-distant repair operations would be.)
About this same time, someone brought in a standard, cardboard box that contained four live chickens. It was placed in the back room, awaiting shipment the next day. (This isn’t at all unusual as the place gets all manner of animals – snakes, turtles, chickens, alligators, etc. – on a regular basis, which is another column in itself.) Alas, as if employees weren’t having enough problems, the bottom fell out of the box, leaving a pile of straw, chicken poop and an egg on the post office floor…and four chickens flying and running around the place.
Fortunately, clerk Dana Gebharet is an old farm girl. With the efficiency of an Army first-sergeant, she organized her fellow employees and, with their help, she cornered and grabbed the escaped birds.
What’s the old post office motto? “Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night shall stay our couriers from their appointed rounds.” One might also add neither furnace failure, crashed computers nor wild chickens.
Dana took the egg home and fried it for breakfast.
