Steaming like a Pie

Theo Tait

• Mailman by J. Robert Lennon
  Granta, 483 pp, £15.99, October 2003, ISBN 1 86207 625 1

In 1986, a postal employee in Edmond, Oklahoma ran amok with a gun, shooting 14 co-workers dead and wounding six others before killing himself. Nearly twenty similar incidents occurred at American post offices during the 1980s and 1990s, though on a smaller scale. As a result ‘going postal’ came to be used as a synonym for a berserk outburst of violence. Charles Bukowski’s butch, squalid autobiographical novel Post Office (1971) gives some idea of how this might have come about: ‘It was 12 hours a night, plus supervisors, plus clerks, plus the fact that you could hardly breathe in that pack of flesh, plus stale baked food in the "non-profit” cafeteria.’ Since then, the US Postal Service has tried to improve the tense, demoralising working atmosphere, and to reduce the pressures on staff: the long, hard shifts; the paramilitary management style; the labyrinthine grievance and disciplinary procedures. Potentially violent employees are watched and treated carefully (a fair number of ex-military join the USPS). Being a ‘postal carrier’, to use the current term, is one of the most sought-after blue-collar jobs in America, secure and relatively well-paid. Postal employees are no more likely to be assaulted by their colleagues than anyone else; statistically speaking, ‘going postal’ is a myth. Yet it’s a durable myth, the idea of the mailman as walking time-bomb: a cartoon version of what Philip Roth called ‘the indigenous American berserk’.