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Please, Mr. Postman

by Will Cantrell | 3, Add your Comment | Mar 6, 2010

This morning, Travis, my mailman, delivered the news to me.

“… it’s because of the economy, Mr. C. It’s all over CNN, ” he said.

“Travis, you guys have threatened to do this many times before. ”

“Well this time we mean it. We really do. We just can’t afford to do Saturday deliveries anymore.”

“What do you mean ’can’t afford ’? How much are stamps these days? About $8 apiece? Seems like you guys should be able to afford to deliver the mail on Saturdays and Sundays too. I remember when stamps were a dime.”

“I don’t know what stamps cost these days, Mr. C. Personally, I do everything online. You know…shop…. pay bills…. everything”, he shrugged.

“TRAVIS, NO! Not you,” I gasped!

“You gotta live in the real world, Mr. C. Anyway, she says that we can’t afford to do Saturday mail anymore.”

“She? Your manager?”

“No. Suze?”

“Suze?”

“You know Suze. Suze  Orman. She’s that woman on TV who knows everything and tells your wife or girlfriend whether you can afford to buy anything or do stuff. You’ve seen her on the cable. Her answer is always “no, you can’t afford it”. The big guy’s wife, — you know, the Postmaster General’s wife — was on her TV show last night and she says that the Post Office can no longer afford to do Saturday deliveries. I saw the whole show. Suze was pretty mad about the whole thing. You should have seen her Mr. C. ”

“Who said that? The big guy’s wife or Suze Orman?”

“Both of them! ‘Course, ‘the thing’ is that Congress has to sign off on it. Right now they are mulling things over.”

“Well nobody mulls like Congress. Or takes as long. I guess I’ll be seeing you on Saturdays for awhile longer then.”

“I wouldn’t count on it, Mr. C. Nancy Pelosi  and a bunch of people from Congress are going to be on the Suze Show tonight! By the way, here’s your mail. By the way, you might want to get Sports Illustrated to send you another copy of the Swimsuit Issue. I kinda tore the picture of Brooklyn Decker on the cover. Sorry. ”

With all due respect to both Travis (and Brooklyn Decker), my reaction to the Post Office’s “new” idea is “Yippeeeeeee”! How come you guys didn’t do this a long time ago?” In fact, I think that the Post Office should just stop the home delivery of mail altogether! It would probably save quite a bit of money, lower the ‘Overall National Bad News Quotient’, and thereby raise the collective spirits and psyche of the entire country.

I no longer get checks in the mail. Any meager funds that happen to wander in my direction come via what the bank calls “direct deposit”. (Even then, it only stays in the account about three nanoseconds before those people at Macy’s,  Georgia Power and a few other places, somehow gather some electrons together, send them over to the bank and faster than you can say “Ben Bernanke”, it’s all drained out.)

To be honest, all I ever seem to get from the Post Office is mostly bad news or, at best, stuff that you could really care less about at the moment: bills, junk mail, second requests, junkier mail, past due notices, tax forms, jury summons, layaway expirations, and more even junkier mail.  I can’t easily recall  getting a piece of good news by mail. Even birthday cards are another reminder that I’m not getting any younger.  Occasionally, I might receive discount coupons but by the time they are delivered to me, they’ve usually expired on yesterday.  I do get a few magazines in the mail, but Travis, I’m pretty sure, reads them before I do. If it’s one thing that I hate, it’s when someone else reads the magazines that I have subscribed to before I do. I don’t want to read them anymore. (Hell, you never know where Travis has been, if you get my drift.)

The whole thing is very depressing when you think about it. I’m pretty sure that this is the case for most other living American as well. For example, when is the last time that you saw the 82-year-old neighbor lady do cartwheels back to the house because she’s just read a letter at the mailbox saying that she’s just won the lottery? (You’re right. Never.) The only time that I can remember getting a good news delivery from the mailman was ages ago and it was something that had to be wrapped in a plain brown wrapper.

Most good news, time honored phrases such as:

-”She’s postponed the History Test until Monday.” OR

- “The check cleared. We have $0.85 left in the account.” OR

-“Whew! The pregnancy test came back negative! We were lucky this time. I was worried. You gotta, I mean, you gotta get a vasectomy, Harold.

are all delivered over the phone, in person, and typically at either 10.00 a.m. or 3:00 p.m on weekdays. (I have these Good News Delivery times on good authority, by the way.)

Of course, if the Post Office ever really saw fit to stop delivering mail completely and require people to come get the bad news instead, the question remains as to what will become of Travis and his friends? My suggestion is to turn all of the Post Offices into Starbuck’s locations or better yet, liquor stores. After all, many of us can often use an alcoholic drink — -or two — once we open our mail.

© Copyright 2010 Will Cantrell

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3 Responses to “Please, Mr. Postman”

  1. Mark says:
    March 7, 2010 at 7:42 am

    Very enjoyable, Will. I suspect the withering of all things postal will continue as electronic replacements continue to grow in both popularity, plausibility, and availability. Your comments about where Travis might have been and brown wrappers put me in mind of an anecdote you might enjoy.

    I worked for the USPS in the 1980′s on a loading dock and I enjoyed a subscription to Playboy Magazine. Each month, I unloaded the truckload of pallets containing our state’s subscriber’s issues via forklift for sorting to destination post offices. Once my co-workers discovered one copy belonged to me, they would sort those pallets as quick as you like to find the carrier route sorted bundle containing it. They would pull mine from the bundle, have the supervisor initial it, and they’d open it to pass around while I was still unloading. It always got back to me to carry home by the end of my shift. I thought it hilarious and never objected. Besides, it got me acquainted with that month’s Playmate a few days earlier than would have occurred otherwise.

    Reply
  2. Mike Cox mike cox says:
    March 7, 2010 at 9:30 am

    I hope you subscribed for the articles.

    Reply
  3. Marti Lawrence says:
    March 7, 2010 at 3:35 pm

    Cute article – thanks for sharing! I will share this on Facebook.

    Reply

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Will Cantrell
Will Cantrell
About the author Will Cantrell: Will Cantrell (a pseudonym) is a freelance writer and humorist. A graduate of Georgia Tech and a former banker, Cantrell, he says, writes “not about life as we know it, but rather about life as how we suspect that it really is.” As an example, he suspects that his cell phone has secret legs, sprouts them when no one is looking and then uses them to crawl under the sofa or front seat of the car. "Obviously that's why I loose the damn thing so much," he says. Will bets that your cell phone has the same proclivities. The legend is that at an early age he wandered south, got lost and like most males was loathe to ask for directions. He was recently sighted somewhere close to I-285, still lost and saying that he was trying to “...write his way home.” Of course, there are a lot of people who suspect that “Cantrell ain't wrapped too tight” but hope that he keeps writing about his experiences as he finds his way back to the main highway. Will has just completed a first book entitled "The Color Fuqua — a mostly true collection of modern tall tales". It is due for publication in July, 2010. He is currently involved in writing a second book, "Nouns and Other Issues". It is due for publication in February, 2011.

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