Jill Christine |

Posts Tagged ‘Jill Christine’

POSTAL By: Jill Christine

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

The Central Florida regional post office received more complaints about East Lakewood than about any other branch. This was all because of Rick.

Rick looked slow with his tired eyes and droopy gray mustache, but he was clever when it came to annoying customers; he took great pride in beating them down, then trampling their last nerves. During his twenty-eight years at East Lakewood’s customer service counter, he enraged more people than all of his coworkers put together. He ate garlic pickles before his shift each morning; he only took breaks when the line was at least ten deep; in the evening he locked the office doors ten minutes before closing time, then pantomimed exaggerated shrugs when people knocked on the glass and waved their unmailed envelopes and packages.

At the counter, no one escaped without a scolding. Rick ordered his customers to repack boxes, rewrite address labels, or fill out unnecessary forms. He knew the postal service’s every rule, and what he didn’t know, he made up.

“You’ll have to find a new envelope for this; you wrote the address in the wrong color ink.”

“You can’t use a snowflake stamp on a letter in June. The snowflakes are for winter only.”

Behind his back, Rick’s coworkers whispered about him and wondered why he was so evil. Really, evil was too strong a word. He simply loved to annoy, and he’d found the perfect job for it.

He also loved being challenged. When a customer questioned his orders or suggested his scale needed to be calibrated, Rick smiled through his mustache and put that customer’s outgoing mail in the special pile. The special pile never saw the mail truck.

The special pile went home with Rick.

No matter how many complaints Rick earned, he was never fired. This was because termination decisions had to come from the national office. All complaints were forwarded from the regional office to the national office, but the national office never listened to complaints. The national office had more important matters to worry about, like whether next year’s rate increase should be two cents or three. So Rick kept being Rick, and the complaints kept coming.

Rick was usually the last employee in the building at night. He liked to hang around and close up himself so he could carry the day’s special pile to his car without being questioned.

One evening he stood in the back room, surveying the special pile with disappointment. The day had delivered a meager haul from uncooperative customers – a few small boxes, and a pair of certified envelopes containing boring legal documents. A larger pile of packages sat nearby, sorted and ready for delivery in the morning. Reasoning that he deserved an award for his continued commitment to excellence in customer service, Rick dug through the pile, looking for anything worth taking. He opened boxes, scattering packing peanuts across the scuffed gray tile, and pouted when he found nothing of interest. His mustache drooped even more than usual.

Then he spotted a plain square box at the bottom of the pile. Wrapped in brown paper, it lacked a proper address and sufficient postage. Instead it just said

RICK

in neat block letters. Rick didn’t enjoy opening mail addressed to him nearly as much as he enjoyed opening mail addressed to others, but because he was already holding the box, he shrugged and tore off the paper. The box inside had

FRAGILE

stenciled clearly on all sides. Rick had never been able to resist a fragile box. He drop-kicked it across the room, then retrieved it and jumped on it, causing one corner to crumple and cave in. He scooped it up and slammed it against the wall a few times for good measure before tearing it open. Inside was a smaller, flatter package, slightly crushed and wrapped in festive paper. A sticker on top said

DO NOT OPEN UNTIL CHRISTMAS.

Rick glanced at the office calendar. It was April 14. He tore away the wrapping and found a large, stiff envelope.

DO NOT BEND

was scrawled across the front in permanent marker. His mustache twitching with glee, Rick bent the envelope crisply down the middle.

What happened next took less than half a second. The bend in the envelope glowed bright green, a nauseating light that radiated out and surrounded Rick with sizzling heat and pulsing pressure. It beat in on him, a crushing force shoving at him from all sides like a trash compactor, smashing his building scream into a choked gurgle that died in his throat. His eyes imploded in his head. His nose flattened and sank into his skull. His skin flaked and tore; his organs hemorrhaged; his blood vaporized in a stink of copper. His skeleton splintered and crumpled. What had once been Rick was now a cubed mass of flash-dried tissue and fragments of bone with an official post office nametag smashed into one side. The mass thunked into the tattered box marked FRAGILE. The box’s flaps whispered shut and retaped themselves, and a small label appeared on top. It said

RETURN TO SENDER.

In the morning, another employee found the box. It couldn’t be returned without an address, so it was redirected to the department of dead letters, where it was eventually destroyed.

Complaints about the East Lakewood branch dropped dramatically after that. The regional office passed on this news to the national office, which sent an impersonal letter of congratulations and an engraved plaque before returning to the more important matter of deciding the next rate increase.

Jill Christine (http://www.jillchristine.com) lives in southwest Florida with a menagerie of mostly rescued animals and a flock of mostly grumpy characters. When she’s not serving as secretary to her various and vocal muses, Jill is an independent designer, creating collectible plush and soft sculpture pieces for an international market.