GOING POSTAL AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE: A RANT

It's official: the phrase "going postal" should not be used to mean "freaking out with rage and mowing down your co-workers with a shotgun." That's because, according the recent findings of a commission established by Postmaster General William J. Henderson, "postal workers are no more likely to physically assault, sexually harass or verbally abuse their co-workers than employees in the national work force."

Henderson established the commission in 1998, promising that relations with employees-- who have more than 100,000 grievances filed with the U.S. Postal Service-- was his "#1 priority." We thought that was kinda wack when we heard it, because we've spent way more of our valuable time on line at the post office than anyone should do, so we would have thought that Henderson's #1 priority would be relations with customers, who during the last 50 years of postal service meltdown have racked up a thousand times more grievances than bureaucratically ensconced employees have.

The commission said going postal is "a myth," that not all that many Postal Service employees have followed in the footsteps of the Edmond, Oklahoma letter carrier who killed fourteen of his co-workers and wounded six others in 1986. The commission surveyed 12,000 poster workers and 3,000 employees in other jobs around the country-- and spent nearly $4 million doing so! We believe the commission is right, but only because it takes some wit and energy to kill somebody, let alone a lot of people, and our commission, which met yesterday and only cost $47 (for beer), determined that postal workers were the dimmest and laziest creatures on the planet, invertebrates included. So that "going postal" should mean "devolving from human form into useless organic material."