Going Postal Again

Yesteray at the Bulk Mail Facility in Atlanta, on Jackson Parkway, another postal employee has gone “postal” by stabbing his supervisor.

The alleged stabber is a law student. So far, he has refused to talk to the authorities about the crime. The supervisor is in the hospital and is expected to survive.

I remember one time it happened at the building I worked at in Atlanta. Morgan Bailey, a supervisor and friend of mine was shot dead along with several other postal employees.

Morgan was red headed and an easy going guy. He was electronics minded before the world was. In fact, usually he was so absorbed by the upcoming electronic world he let his job run itself. He sold electronic gadgets through his catalog he carried in his brief case. He introduced me to music via headphones. I thought that was heaven.

Morgan did some crazy things as a citizen and a supervisor. One time he wrote a letter to the post master complaining about a certain red-headed supervisor, which was he. That is a long story, I’ll have to devote a post to sometime.

Morgan was not very tolerant of people sometimes. That may have been the reason he was shot and killed.

A few years afterwards, I saw his wife and their red-headed kids selling puppies in front of K-Mart.

One employee who was shot was deaf. He did not hear the gun shots to run. He walked around the corner to face the gunman face to face and BLAM! He wasn’t killed. He was wounded and took about a year recuperate, but the last I heard he was back at work. He refused to return to the Atlanta Postal facility so they gave him a job closer to his home in north Cobb County.

After I transferred to Marietta and was there a few months a employee, in his second week reported to work with a machete. He chase our supervisor Nate around swinging his blade at Nate. The employee was arrested and fired. Nate got promoted.

One time at either the North Atlanta Station or the Northside Station there was flair up and a couple of supervisors were killed.

And as a violence comic-relief was the female postal employee who was parked in her car near the Federal Annex’s loading docks and a police officer thought she looked suspicious and ordered her of her car. She got out and beat him to a pulp but not before he called for help. Help arrived and she beat them up too, and more help arrived. She ended up almost killing with her bare hands five Atlanta Policemen before she was brought under control.

Ever since I joined the Postal Service violence there ran high. Although, the three incidents I mentioned I knew the assaulters and the victims, I never saw the violence myself.

There is an excellent book, which I think is out of print, titled GOING POSTAL by Don Lasseter, which deals in about 25 deadly postal instances. My old friend Morgan Bailey’s case is one of the chapters.

The main reason, I think, is the clock pressure. All the mail has to be in the carrier’s hands by a certain time. Any delay is inexcusable. I have seen people suspended and fired because they could not regulate themselves to the “urgency of the mail flow” as their disciplinary papers read.

Around 4:30 to 6:99 in the morning just about everybody gets wild-eyes, like they are panic-stricken to get the mail to the carriers to sort it, so they can be out of the streets delivering it at a reasonable time.

Just think, all those firings, suspension, killings, and bloodshed was because you might complain because your mail was delivered late.