My Mailman's a Loser

Have you ever seen the movie "Funny Farm"? It's the one with Chevy Chase where he and his girlfriend move out to the country in the hopes of living in peace and quiet. One of the highlights of the film is the mailman. He drives this bomb of a car and doesn't stop to put Chevy's mail in the mailbox. Instead, he guns it as he approaches Chevy's driveway and then throws the mail out of the passenger side window. The mail ends up caked with mud and scattered everywhere. Needless to say, Chevy's not happy. Now I'm convinced that my new mail man is the understudy for the one in "Funny Farm".

Up until recently we've had a nice older gentleman named John deliver our mail. John was a sweet guy, loved to small talk, but wouldn't chew your ear off. He was never offended that my dog barked at him incessantly and would even go so far as to say Violet's just "doing her job, protecting the house from strangers" when her obnoxious yapping would pierce his eardrums. When I asked John to leave my mail between our storm door and front door during the holidays so photocards wouldn't get damaged he had no problem doing this (our mail is usually folded and slid through a tiny slot in our front door). Life was great. Then, one day John disappeared. At first I thought John took a vacation, then I thought he was sick, now I've resigned myself to the fact that he was relocated or retired. Regardless, we're stuck with a sub-par mailman.

This new guy who delivers our mail does not take pride in his work. For instance, he jams too many papers through our mail slot at once, resulting in letters getting ripped open from the edge of the slot. When it's raining, all of our mail is practically paper-maiched together. There's no excuse for this because our front door is covered by four feet of porch overhang. I have this visual of our mailman skipping down the street, waving our stack of mail in the rain blocks before he reaches our street, just to tick us off.

Today I opened my front door to find two packages, one on its side and the other upside down, shoved in the corner of my porch. It was like the mailman was too lazy to walk up the stairs to drop them off so he just chucked them from the street, like he was partaking in that carnival game, the ring-toss. Another thing that irks me about this guy is that I used to be able to leave a letter to be mailed under our "If You're Ann Curry-- Don't Bother" doormat and John would take care of it. This new guy won't pick up any letters I leave out to be mailed. Dude, that's your job!

"Why don't you call and complain?" my husband asked when I vented to him one day about this mailman from hell.

"And get a U.S. Postal Worker on my bad side? No thank you," I replied.

The other day I took my dog for a walk and thought I glimpsed John driving up the street in his little mail cart. I smiled and thought back to those happy days of mail delivery. As the truck got closer I saw it wasn't John and my heart sank.

Oh, Lord, why do you play such tricks on me?