On Mon, 7 Dec 1998, Marilyn Harper wrote:

>      be paying as much attention as they could to getting the mail out,
>      except maybe for the millions of advertizing catalogues, I love the
>      new stamps.  I figure if I have to pay bills, at least I can pay them
>      with something pretty.  Sometimes I wonder what the people and
>      organizations I send them to think and whether maybe it cheers them up
>      a little.  This is probably silly, since I assume phone bills, etc.,
>      are sorted by machines that are unlikely to care.
>
>      Incidentally, it seems to me that my mail is getting to me pretty
>      quick recently.

We often forget that we have the best and cheapest postal service in the
world.  (Granted, Chicago is a big exception.)

Contrary to media-driven conventional wisdom, postal employees are
statistically LESS likely to be killed on the job than the average
American worker.  Source: a Centers for Disease Control study published in
"Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report" a couple years ago.

A handful of highly publicized murders by unbalanced postal workers should
be understood in the context of a postal workforce of 750,000 (and many
thousands of UN-publicized murders by unbalanced NON-postal workers.)

On the other hand, it is true that the Postal Service has more than its
share of odd folks in its workforce.  Mental health professionals assure
me that the USPS is by far the nation's largest employer of people with
severe mental illness.  This is because of its unique hiring process which
excludes subjective considerations such as the applicant's personality, in
favor of testable skills and performance.

This hiring process was created when the Post Office was changed from a
political patronage organization to Civil Service.  Given that every
postmaster in the country at the time was a political appointee, it was
necessary to prevent them from continuing to hire only loyal party
workers.

Most of the people who work for the Postal Service would probably fit
easily into any employment situation.  But this grand impartiality has
supplemented the postal workforce with many thousands of dedicated,
intelligent, highly skilled folks who do well on tests and in complicated
mail sorting tasks, but who have traits like facial tics or a mental
illness history or other eccentricities which might prevent them from
being hired into good jobs by ordinary employers, even in today's tight
labor market.  Their talents would probably be wasted if the Postal
Service acted like a mainstream employer.

We all benefit from this odd historical accident.

                            Larry Kestenbaum