From the beginning, everyone told me, “Oh, that is a good job” or “Post Office jobs are hard to come by, you’d better hang on to that one!” Mind you, this advice never came from an actual postal employee, but from people like my Aunt Carolyn. Her only job was in the mid-eighties, cleaning dog hair from the drains of over-sized sinks at BarkenWoof Pet Salon before she got married.”You better not fuck this one up,” she warned me during Thanksgiving dinner of 2003, trying her best to sound omniscient with corn in her teeth. “Government benefits? Damn right.” Her lips glistened with grease as her mouth issued words of admonishment.

The job itself wasn’t terrible, mind you. The mail carriers never smelled that great and paper cuts were the biggest on-the-job hazard; but the customers, the needy fucking customers, became my biggest issue. After just a few months of slinging stamps and mindlessly asking, “Anything, liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous,” (as if someone would scoff in disbelief and announce that they’ll be taking their nitroglycerin-and-kitten-shipping business elsewhere)  it became apparent some of these people thought of me as their friend. My courtesy and professionalism were readily being mistaken for genuine interest and affability by a segment of the population who collected fucking stamps and still wrote letters.

I was a postal employee, for Christ’s sake, not your goddamn buddy. I was saying and doing whatever it took to make you quickly leave satisfied, like an efficient, overbooked hooker.  Ship some asshole’s Ebay junk once a week for two years, and the next thing you know, he wants to be your friend on Facebook and is inviting you to his son’s bowling party. All it takes is mailing the same lady’s packages to her son in Philadelphia every month for half a decade, and the crazy bitch wants you to join her Saturday quilting circle.

“Your son is a pussy and your quilts are heinous,” is all I wanted to scream at these people, but I couldn’t. I was a professional, mind you. After six years, I was a small town community figure. I knew most everyone, and they knew me.

At first it was cute, really; Mrs. Heathers asking me to remove her gas cap on her new Toyota at the gas station; Mr. Cowers asking me to help him into his car at the pharmacy; the second-youngest Hebert kid asking me to tie her shoe in line at the convenience store. These things were precious, at first, but soon grew tiresome.

Eventually, I learned to only go out in public in my regular clothes, not my uniform, in an effort to avoid being recognized. The sometimes necessary lunch-break errand to the mall or grocery store was done wearing sunglasses and a scowl in an effort to seem unapproachable. It wasn’t just my “friends” I was trying to avoid, but complete strangers as well.

On one such lunch-break, while picking out a birthday card for my step-mother, a lady walked up and said, “Oh thank the Lord! I’m running so short on time, could you bring these to the Post Office for me?” This stranger then preceded to pull out a stack of high-school graduation invitations from her purse and pushed them toward me. They were unstamped, mind you.

I looked her in the eye through my dark sunglasses, didn’t say a word, and slowly opened the musical birthday card in my hand, the silence between us suddenly filled with Kool and the Gang’s, Celebration. My steady, emotionless face, juxtaposed with the assurance that we were gonna have a good time tonight, was enough to convince her to put her mail back into her purse and walk away.

While at work and dressed in my “blues” (that’s the term my old coworker Randall Willard used, regardless if he was singularly referring to his shirt, pants, shorts, hat, windbreaker or parka) I would greet, laugh, patronize, ship, stamp, label – everything I was paid to do, I did with a smile. Mind you, smiles aren’t fake if you get paid for them. Contrived is likely a better term, but fake? The permanent lines around my mouth — the little bull-dog looking facial jowls etched into my skin? That shit ain’t fake.

“WEAR your bluuues, don’t SHARE your bluuues,” Randall would sing-song daily, right about the same time my facial muscles would begin to cramp. By mid afternoon, my face would begin to twitch worse than that middle-aged bag-boy (bag-man?) at the grocery store with Tourette Syndrome. At least I didn’t drool. Wash your produce, by the way.

On what would be my last day at the Post Office, at approximately 3:47pm (or so is documented on the totally unnecessary “Incident Report”) Randall walked up with a package from the back storage room to find a lobby full of impatient patrons and a visibly frustrated me.

“WEAR your bluuues, don’t SHARE your bluuues!” he warbled as he handed the package over to its owner. From the corner of my eye, I watched as he offered his customer a sideways smile with a bit lip, rolled his eyes, and tilted his head ever so slightly in my direction, as if to say “Sorry for Mr. Grumpy Pants over there!”

Nine and a half years of smiling had taken its toll. An impromptu vacation suddenly sounded great. Through clenched teeth, like a budding ventriloquist practicing in the bathroom mirror, I said as loudly as possible, mimicking his tune, “WHY don’t youuuu go FUCK yourseeelf?”

I then looked over at Randall, who was staring at me with the same look my brother used get every time I unplugged the SuperNintendo at a moment of climactic game play; an innocent mixture of confusion, anger, and sadness.

How I loved that look!

I turned my attention back to my customer. The elderly lady at my counter stood still, mouth quivering, much like that retard who slobbers on my apples. “Pardon?” she asked in a manner that seemed a century too late.

I looked her straight in the eyes and sang, “I DON’T believeeee I was TALKING to youuuu,” and slammed her book of stamps down, flat-palmed so as to make a loud smack, and added in falsetto, “Biiiiiiiiiiiitch!” 

Randall gasped as if his hymen has just snapped. I took off my eagle-emblazoned hat, placed it atop my customers head at an angle,  and addressed the lobby crowd.

“Peace OUT, bitcheeees!” I sang operatically.

I applied for an office job downtown, one with small cubicles, faceless co-workers, and promised anonymity. I opened my acceptance letter the day before Christmas, while the entire family was waiting to slice into the ham. Aunt Carolyn, always ready to dish out advice, now a decade older, walked up to me and said, “You can’t spend your whole life doing something that makes you miserable, Stuart. You need to fucking settle down into a job and start a family.” I then watched as her seven-year-old, Kyle, shoved a whole piece of ham into his mouth, choked, and vomited onto the kitchen floor.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Kyle! Chew your food for once, goddamnit!”

I made a note to never listen to her advice again.