Thursday, August 09, 2007

He Went ... A Little Nuts




It's hot out there.

Triple digits, in fact. For three days in a row.

For two days I stood in this shit fully dressed in my business clothes. My work shirt was completely wet with sweat by the time I left. Everything started to look a little purple there for a couple of minutes.

Which gets me to thinking: Doesn't heat make people a little crazy? You know, the kind of heat where you find some non-descript dude just lose it and finally act out on his deep-seated anger fueled by twisted righteousness? Something about all that energy stirring up things, like how heat gets the thunderstorms cracking?

(Personally, I think I tend to just get too lathargic to do much of anything, particularly if it requires me to leave my house and back out into the heat. But that's just me).

I then get to thinking: Would you say that one of these people who has lost his mind is "going postal?"

It used to be that postal workers had that ... thing ... about them. Back in the late 1980s and through the better part of the '90s. It was something that, for lack of a better way of putting it, would make them come back to their workplace and shoot the whole joint up.

But something doesn't seem quite fair.

People might be losing their minds, but are they really "going postal?"

No doubt government-run services can be frustrating. The city parking ticket clerks come to mind, except I have a weird feeling that they might be more of a mind to show up to your workplace and take the fight to you.

But I've found the people at the post office these days to be quite pleasant, and their new track record has shown that, at the least, they don't seem to be feeling particularly psychopathic.

It's a cliche. An anachronism. The vocabulary of the lazy.

If your lexicon is limited and you think it makes you sound nuveau to throw a little slang, you might want to rethink "going postal." Because postal workers themselves aren't really going postal anymore.

And while we're at it ... let's just drop "da bomb" on 1997 and leave it where it belongs.



8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cold beer, baby. Fixes eveything.

Rusty said...

116 heat index today. Good to know the oppresive heat is something that will bring nearly the entire collective to a shared opinion:

Fuck this weather.

I'm not quite so sure. The postmaster-guy here is named Chip, and I'm thinking he might "go postal" any day now. He started yelling at a lady who could not recognize which folder was for express mail, despite his desperate attempts to point it out to her. He began yelling, she became more confused. Finally, he threw a stapler against the wall and walked to the back of the store.

I had been waiting in line directly behind this woman and had to wait another 10 minutes for someone else to come up front and help me. I have no idea what happened with that poor woman.

Anonymous said...

ER nurse here. And as someone at the front lines of the heat->crazy battle, it's a direct correlation! And I'm ready for some cool fall weather already! I'm sick of the drama coming into my emergency room taking up real patient beds! Pass the damn beer.

Anonymous said...

When it's 100+ degrees, with humidity off the chart, it's called "Going Roastal".

I LOVE the P.O.
For 41 cents, I can send a letter across the country. Couldn't drive it there for that price...

eric said...

the beer helps. now if everybody else does it, guys like rusty's describing who will end up in the emergency room eventually , will be able to live a fuller life in the summer. i love the post office, too.

Jay said...

Mullets aren't cool anymore?

How come nobody ever tells me?!?

Anonymous said...

Farmers are going to be the next ones to lose it - they're heavily armed - they're out in the sticks - it's getting harder and harder with the weather and the economy (I can't back this up - sounds good though)

Farmers are gonna lose it and plough the feilds of socity with a combine and a pitchfork.

Rick Rockhill said...

yeah it has been hot just about everywhere. Amazingly I went to the Post Office the other day and it was nice and cool there. Maybe that's why the postal workers are so happy-friendly. They have the coolest spot in town