…pride goeth

To me,
My daughter’s friend, the debate fiend, coaches me in modifying this harangue and offers that generalizations never work. The remark that links all postal workers together in the mean category—as if the nature of the job makes meanness inherent—is against all the rules.
Gee whiz, T.

Then, wouldn’t you know, there would came a day—two days later—that I needed help from my mail carrier and when that day came, I could only hope that no one with a postal affiliation had forwarded my thoughts in the form of an internote to my postal worker, the identity of whom could have been discovered after a thirty-second address and zip code search.

That was the first thing the husband noted, “Are you not aware of the danger in castigating the service industry? You are asking for spit in your burger and to have your favorite skirt misplaced by the cleaners. “Have you lost your everluvin’ mind?”

For him that question was actually rhetorical, (which is also against all debate rules,) but he did raise a valid question. Should we grant a certain degree of civility to persons who share our planet purely due to the threat of retaliation?[1]

Anyway, back to the personal postal problem: That same week, the teenager daughter had been assisting the neighbor with collecting, sorting and forwarding their mail while they were on an extended vacation and during the ice storm, someone slid into their mailbox and shattered it.
One guess—Yup, it’s a federal offense to deliver mail to any address not expressly stated on the package or envelope without written notification or authorization by the addressee.

Delivery to the front door is verboten once the route has been designated a driving route and … you guessed it, that too is against policy.

I had nearly reached the end of my tether, having already overextended the tensile strength of every stretch of my imagination, when the postal worker released the final shot, “Besides that, I won’t do it because she’s mean.”

To me,
Turns out the neighbor shares my general opinion of the postal industry and has had the nerve to make her views known to the postal supervisor. Oops, T

Reality bite: …which affirms once and for all the length and breadth of the husband’s brilliance.

[1] This is the enlightenment I gain when I spend my time magazine articles from “Applied Ethics,” reading fortuitously placed at my doctor’s office—just a guess that doctors don’t read the magazines from their own waiting rooms.