phil jacobsen

Don't Put the Mail in Your Mouth: Number Two

(Warning: This story is gross—I don’t like it)

Thanks to advertising we know that not only do bears shit in the woods, they also use Charmin toilet paper to wipe their bear bottoms. But, what about Postal Carriers? Even though we’re outside six or more hours per day, when the call of nature comes where do we go? The obvious answer is a convenience store. But when the inconvenient truth places us far away from a convenience store, sometimes we go in our pants. This is my story.

A Postal Carrier has a pretty isolated life. Even though the post office employs over 800,000 people, we spend most of the day alone. As we walk your streets, delivering your mail we might seem semi-meticulous when it comes to accurately delivering your mail, but our manners would make Emily Post use UPS.

We talk to ourselves and piss in a cup in the back of our trucks. When this happens, we don’t wash our hands. Unless you count using the mail as a paper towel.

There are two reasons we walk fast. Reason #1: If we go slow, we get fired. Reason #2: We are farting. We fart in our trucks and we fart when we walk. There is no reason to hold back what our intestines have built up, because when we are by ourselves in the great outdoors a fart will dissipate if we “crop dust” your neighborhood. Dogs don’t hate us because of our uniforms, they hate us because they smell us.

We’re on a tight schedule and when we have loose bowels, we risk getting fired. Strategically placed throughout all mail routes our bosses have placed “scan points.” These scan points lets the boss know where we are all throughout the day. If we take 2.5 hours from one point to another instead of two hours, then we face the Scan Point Inquisition. And, letting your boss know you had the runs, the trots, ass piss or brown liquid running from your behind is not an acceptable excuse for running behind.

Call it the post-holiday browns, whiskey shits or postal poops, my body did not want to be at work today. Climbing up and down stairs or in and out of my truck was like tempting fecal fate. I caught a lucky break today when I found a construction worker’s port-a-pottie on my route. I thought this upright coffin of waste stunk when I walked into it, but it reeked after I delivered my package. The hand sanitizer was either empty or frozen, but I was able to clean my soiled hands in the snow. Forget the yellow; don’t eat the brown snow.

As the day wore on and my muscles were wearing out from the clinching, the tightening and the preventing of Mount Vesuvius from erupting in my blue pants. I feared I was going to Krakatoa. It happens; I know it happens. Nearly every Postal Carrier has a story of leaving a tread mark on their route.

With procrastination the few days after Christmas are just as busy or busier than the days leading up to Christmas. Today I made all of my scan points on time. I also left my mark.