By Emily
Grade: D-

Every few months, a (giant corporation that I work for) hiring specialist makes a special trip to the Big State Hospital for the Feeble-Minded, Crippled, Creepy and Chronically Incompetent. There, they seek out the hospital’s most challenged patients: non-English speaking hunchbacks with bad attitudes and deep-seated needs for attention are their ideal recruits. Then they put all these people in a bus and drive them back to the (corporation again) building, suit them up in uniforms, and have them start delivering mail.

Lucky is the least annoying of the horrible mailmen. He’s very ancient and weathered, kind of Ansel Adams –looking. His real name is Lucky, like a dog or a Mafioso. He is neither – we think he used to be a Greaser in the ‘50s. He still smokes a lot of cigarettes (possibly Lucky Strikes). He is the best mailman because he hardly ever asks what box to put something in. The only downside of Lucky is that he is sort of starved for social contact, so if you start talking to him about anything other than mail you can expect to spend the next fifteen minutes listening to him spout nonsensical folksy adages (‘People feel bad for me, deliverin’ all this mail, and I tell them that if it weren’t for all this mail I’d be out of a job’) while you nod politely and pray for him to go away.

By way of contrast, the worst mailman is Sex Offender. He has close-set, squinty eyes made owl-like by his round little glasses, and there’s an ingratiating syrupy fakeness/ Hannibal Lecterishness to his tone of voice when he says, “Hello, Miss Gould.” He stands too close when he makes me sign for packages and the smell of his cologne lingers long after he’s made his rounds. Sometimes he makes me sign for things that it’s not my job to sign for BECAUSE HE KNOWS THAT THIS PISSES ME OFF. Whenever I give him the slightest bit of ‘tude in return, he affects an incredibly fake polite tone and pretends not to understand what I’ve just said. I hate him so much, but he’s never done anything wrong enough for me to complain about him, and anyway that would be kind of admitting that he has the power to affect me, which is just playing into his hands. I know that I am coming off as the crazy one in this situation, but believe me, HE IS THE CRAZY ONE.

Somewhere in between is Crippled Mailman. “Ok,” you are thinking, “how can you not feel some amount of sympathy towards someone who perseveres at his difficult task despite his physical handicap? Emily, you are a monster. This is worse than when you hated on pregnant ladies.” Well, I may be a monster for being annoyed by the incompetence of the crippled mailman, but you know what? I kind of think that if someone is physically incapable of doing their job, MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE A DIFFERENT JOB. The crippled mailman has a bad back, for which he wears one of those wide leather back-support belts. He is always making me sign for the big heavy packages of people in different departments who sit nowhere near me, which I then deliver to them. Thus in effect he is actually forcing me to do his job for him. If this goes on any longer, maybe our roles will be reversed and he will be the full-time bitter assistant and I will be the full-time Crippled Mailman.