Seeing assorted federal employees going postal (explanation later) about losing their seats on the gravy train has prompted recollections of my past — admittedly brief – experience working for Uncle Sam.
As a high school senior and into my freshman year of college, I worked at the Johnstown Post Office. It was something like 15 or 16 hours a week during school and much more during the Christmas rush and summer.
It was a sweet gig, paying more than $6 an hour, which was a lot in 1973, when the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. I recall people being amazed to learn after the fact that I made more in one year on that part-time, temporary job than I made my first year working full-time at the local Woke Gazette.
In 2010, having retired from journalism in March 2003, I picked up a few extra bucks working a couple of months for the U.S. Census Bureau.
Both the post office and census time gave me great insight into the federal employment.
The job at the post office was a bit eye-opening for a teenager. This was before the term “going postal” sprang into use, a reference to disgruntled employees, often of the post office, shooting up their workplaces and killing supervisors and employees.
That usage started after such incidents began springing up at post offices in 1986 or so.
Let’s just say if some breathless reporter had asked me if I was shocked such things could happen, I’d have told them no – hell no.
It was on Aug. 20, 1986, that disgruntled post office employee Patrick Sherrill shot and killed 14 employees and wounded six others at the Edmond, Okla., post office before shooting and killing himself.
Sherrill had claimed to be a Vietnam veteran. Records indicate that while he had been a member of the Marine Corps, he had served domestically. Still, there was an association between “going postal” events and Vietnam veterans down the line.
I worked with a lot of veterans who were full-time employees during my time at the Johnstown Post Office and they ran the gamut from seemingly completely normal to obviously disturbed.
There was a supervisor and veteran we’ll call Lover Boy, who was married, but not a fanatic about it. He routinely took up a post hanging over the mail-sorting rack of one particularly large-breasted, female, high school part-timer.
I don’t know what, if anything, transpired between them. I do know she got whatever daily job duty she desired.
Another fill-in supervisor, call him Thirsty, had a habit of disappearing for hours at one of the nearby Washington Street watering holes of the time.
This became a problem when registered mail would arrive and he was the only person able to sign for it.
To make it all the more surreal, the guy looked a lot like actor Lorne Greene, who played the head of the Cartwright clan in the long-running Bonanza television series that was nearing the end of its run back then.
Probably the most memorable character of my post office time, call him Sgt. Bad Intent, was, in retrospect, exactly the type of guy who might have shown up armed one night and shot up the place.
Sgt. Bad Intent laughed a lot, but in a maniacal way. As strange as it sounds, back then bicycle wheels used to be shipped with only an address tag tied to a spoke. They were labeled to handle with care and use caution. Sgt. Bad Intent, when we were loading these wheels into semi-trailers out back, would read the label and wing them the length of the trailers, probably 40 feet.
“Let’s put them up front where they’ll get a good ride,” he would say, laughing at his own little joke.
The census time, while not as dramatic, was educational in its own way. I learned about bad management, government inefficiency, bending of rules, and trying to skew things to a desired outcome.
We were encouraged to go out of our way to help the cause of area political representation by counting any human being with signs of life, even if they might be living as squatters in condemned buildings.
We had some ex-military types in our crew, including one memorable guy with a full-time job in government who also was doing census work, theoretically on the side. He told a lot of stories, including being greeted on his stops by women with open blouses and similar such sexual overtures.
Alas, I was greeted by no semi-naked women, only irritated types disputing my authority to ask them questions, and one particularly disturbed individual who followed me around Kernville for a time, calling me names (sneaky fox?) and suggesting I was part of some conspiracy to oppress him.
This continued until I noted that if he didn’t desist I was going to kick his ass right there on the street.
By the way, we weren’t allowed to carry guns for our protection, even if we were duly licensed to do so.
Although I never did work full-time for the government, I did spend a lot of time working for private employers and always I tried to follow the commands of my bosses. As I used to tell co-workers, if you’re accepting the check, your task is to do what you are told unless it is illegal, unethical or immoral.
When I first started at the Johnstown Woke Gazette, the newsroom was not unionized and I saw more than one person get the old, resign-or-be-fired ultimatum.
When I moved on to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I signed a paper acknowledging I was an “at will employee” and could be fired at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all.
Being secure in my ability to do my job, I signed it and, guess what, I was not fired, but instead took an early buyout offer 15-plus years down the line when I no longer enjoyed working there.
Current federal employees, please take note.
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