Doomed to Fail - Ep 91 - Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night: Going Postal

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Remember, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"? The USPS is an American institution that used to be a very successful lifetime career. Add Richard Nixon and some tight deadlines, and remove all the joy; what do you get? The Goleta postal facility shootings by Jennifer San Marco and the Edmond post office shooting by Patrick Sherrill. It's a tragically American story.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And take off the recording, and we are back on a lovely, warm, cool Wednesday morning. No, Thursday. Whatever, whatever day we were released. Hi, Taylor. How are you?

You should be going to see Dan Carlin later this afternoon, which is going to be really exciting. We can talk about it next week on Monday, which... No, and two. It's the 21st. I totally saw that on the link that I looked up on his website, and immediately forgot that information. So... It's a Thursday. You're close. There you go. I know it's in L.A. and I know his name is Dan Carlin, and you're going to go see him. So, um, Aces. Okay. So we'll go ahead and we'll go ahead and dive right in.

I am I my topic is a little bit unusual compared to everything else because it kind of true prime but also kind of like social phenomenon and kind of wrap them up into one so it should be issue I think you'll find it interesting I hopefully our listeners do hopefully somebody does so I am going to cover a phrase that we kind of hear less and less these days the fight despite the fact that this phenomenon that the phrase is based on happens a lot more often it is the phrase going postal, which I'm sure many of us are very familiar with. Indeed. Taylor, can you guess, so let me start by saying, going postal is a colloquialism we use for mass shootings. There's a reason for it that I'm going to get into. And let me start by asking Taylor, if you can guess how many mass shootings do you think we had in 2022? Oh, my God. In America?

Yeah. Of course. Of course. And the rest of the world, four. In America, 300. You're so off, assignment, funny. How many? 636.

Jesus fucking Christ, America. Fuck you. For context, the entire 1940s had three mass shootings. Cool. The entire 1950s had five. The entire 1960s had 13. And then we kind of pick up the pace in the 1970s. so that's when that's when we hit 33 and oh my god and then the 1980s we like you know didn't do as well

we had 36 and then we kind of started hitting this crescendo with mass shootings around the 1990s around 59 and then from there it just ticked up and up and up and now every year is the most mass shootings actually what's funny is 23 funny what's what's interesting thing is that 23 had like a few less mass shootings than 22 so it was one of the few years where there was like a dip in mass shootings but whatever it just it's gonna keep going up I wonder what it could be

I'm joking I know exactly what it is why do you think it went down is that what you mean no no I mean I wonder why we have so many it's the guns that's my that's my answer yeah well okay so it's it's definitely partially guns but there are of course

other countries that have a ton of guns that don't have the same social issues that we have And I think that's also a huge factor of this. I think anybody's saying, like, I know the soul and only, not you, but like, anybody to say, if this issue is solved, everything is solved, I don't think that's going to be the case. I'm going to get into that here in a minute because it actually touches on the whole term going postal. So the vast, vast majority of what we consider mass shootings are kind of like the shit you would see on cops or live PD, right? like it is a jilted lover shooting up like a part like a barbecue or something or in armed robbery with a single family household that there's a shooting involved in or there's a dispute of the mall and somebody pulls out a gun and starts firing in the food court or like what happened with the Super Bowl thing right like this now we know that that was literally just some random guy but a gun on him and someone looked at him the wrong way he didn't like it so he pulled his gun out so I want to like differentiate that because it's a key distinction.

like there's a key distinction between idiotic human behavior and then calculated deliberate acts of homicide in my opinion do you agree yeah yeah okay okay like but also yeah absolutely like remember that woman who who shot joel osteen's church the other day right like she was like in like very serious medical care for mental illness and got to buy a gun right right exactly exactly so you Yes, yes. Like, that part of like our gun, lack of gun control is, it's funny because I don't think, I don't think very many reasonable people disagree that like that is objectively insane. And a story I'm going to touch on is going to be a part of that as well. There's a demographic of shooters that kind of gave birth to the phrase that we're kind of going into today of going postal. So I'm going to be covering basically like one or two examples of it, basically the first example of it.

in the most notable example of it, and then talk about, like, the post office in general and kind of like the place that it has in our social consciousness or the public consciousness and why it is now pretty much synonymous with workplace violence. Yep. So part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that almost everyone at some point in your life interacts to the post office. We all see our letter carrier. We all, you know, have to go pick up a book of stamps or we used to at least.

like there's there's a connection we all have with it and so when issues with something that we're all through with happens we start to kind of draw associations i put the example of like if you found out that everybody who worked like the friomatic at McDonald's was shooting people at McDonald's like you'd be like okay there's something going on here we should dig a little bit deeper into and yeah that's what happened with the post office so the term was initially go ahead sorry no i just want to tell you that there's a shipping store in my town named Going Postal, and I'm like, that's appropriate it. Yeah, yeah, I heard about that. In the middle of my research, I heard about that. But, I mean, it's almost like comedy now, right? Like, it's such a well-used term at this point. So the term itself isn't actually as old as you might suspect. I was kind of shocked to learn this sale.

Like, it was originally coined in 1993 in the St. Petersburg Times, and it was a- Of Russia or Florida? Florida. But it was an internal moniker. that the post office used itself. Apparently in St. Petersburg, the post office was trying to hold like a consortium to discuss like workplace incidences.

And that's when the term kind of was initially floated. And then some reported for the St. Petersburg Times saw it, heard it, and then printed it. And then that went to the public consciousness as a result of that. So the first shooting at the post office didn't happen that year. It just, that was just a year that this kind of, the phrase kind of popped up. There were a few of these shootings in the 1970s,

and they got like fairly minimal press attention. And then a few in the early 1980s, but it really wasn't until 1980s that people really started being like, there's something going on here. And what happened was in 1986, there was a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma, and a guy named Patrick Sherrill,

who was a mail carrier for it. He walked in on August 20th, and off the back of some poor performance reviews, basically shot up the joint. He walked into work with three guns in his mailbag and started shooting his supervisors and co-workers, ultimately killing 14, wounding additional six, then shooting himself in the head. So that was the first one in 1986. We're like, what, what, because that was a big one.

Like, that many people killed in one setting. Like, that was rare. That's like Columbine numbers. And Columbine was still 10 years away or 8 years away when this happened. So it really drew people's attention to it. And people started kind of paying more and more attention to it. There was another shooting that happened. This was later on.

And I'm going to kind of touch on this one to show that, like, this is not like an issue that happened in 1986 and then went away. This happened in 2006. So there was a woman named Jennifer St. Marco. She was born in 1961. And she lived in California. And for whatever reason, she has helped every random, odd federal job there was. She was like, she worked for a state prison. she worked for the police department she was a lunch lady for her school and eventually her last

career move was working at a post office technically it was a mail sorting facility so it was like a warehouse building but it was it was a post office essentially so she held that job for about six years and around 2000 the year 2000 her behavior started changing in ways that resulted in her being reported by her co-workers to her higher-ups specifically a guy named dexter shannon over her making some rude remarks about somebody that they both knew that had committed suicide. In result, Dexter had seen a bunch of different behavior from her and reported her

to the supervisors, and that resulted in Shannon getting a report saying that she has to report to the supervisor's office to discuss her behavior. She apparently lost her shit to the point where the supervisor had to call the police to come calm her down, and during that incident, they ended

of having to put her under arrest. Wow. She was subject to a 72-hour involuntary voluntary hold by psychologists who evaluated her to figure out what is going on with her. But after 72 hours, they're like, well, we can't definitively say she's a danger to herself or others. So they released her from that hold. So again, systems, people falling into the system, systems breaking apart, systems failing. That's all kind of wrapped up into this, which we're going to get into in depth here in a moment around what the background of all this

was. In January of 2006, she did something absolutely insane. She drove. from Golita, California, down to Los Angeles, to her former apartment. It was an 818 mile drive that she made just so she could go to the old apartment building she lived in to kill one of her former neighbors. It was a woman named Beverly was it Beverly Johnson?

I wrote her name down. No, Beverly Graham. She found this woman, shot her in the head, killed her and then hopped right back in her car and started driving right back to Golita. Like, she was gone. She was far gone. She goes back to her former office, and at that point, she

had just been released from this involuntary hold, and as a result of that hold, the post office for employer had removed or revoked her credentials and her key card, so she technically shouldn't be able to get in anyways. But she got far enough to the parking lot to where she saw a former co-worker, pointed gun at his head to give me her key card, the kid did it, and then he ran off. Oh, my God. She ends up getting access to facility, finding her supervisors, and shooting seven of her supervisors killing them, as well as co-workers before turning the gut on herself and then shooting herself in the head. A lot of weird things that happened up to that point that technically aren't, well,

sort of aren't illegal, but they were, if she had people in her life, then they would have probably got ahead of this. She had a habit of going at grocery stores and convenience stores and buying stuff and then throwing the stuff along with the receipt away right outside and the garbage can outside the store, which is kind of weird if people noticed her doing this. weird there's like so like a million years ago i was listening to a my favorite murderer and there's a woman who killed her husband please someone tell me who this was because i can't remember exactly the details but one thing that she was doing is she was washing their clothes but not drying them

and folding them and putting them wet in the drawers and just like so it's just like something like that it just feels like wait what so what screws loose right like it's like something is wrong because like what are you doing is so weird Taylor, I've had my mind so preoccupied with work things lately. Tonight when I went to yoga, I, like, put my stuff in the cupboards, the locker room and all that. And then I walked in and I started laying my mat down. I realized I'm still running shoes. And I was like, oh, my God.

If anybody's paying attention, I look insane. That could be worse. It's true. Okay, fine, fine, fine. I just want to let you know that you're okay first. Thank you. Thank you. Some other things she would do is that she tried to go out.

and register a business in Golita called the racist press to share her opinions on minorities, which she was prevented from doing. Wow. That's, I mean, we took a weird turn. We took a weird turn. That's very, very bold. Right, right. She somehow claimed that the federal government was trying to mind control her in the rest of the population through the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which kind of sounds like drag.

people reading to kids today? Exactly. Like we eventually came full circle. Yeah, that's silly. She was found walking around a strip mall talking to herself rather frequently. At one point, the gas station near her house, so she would often go to. At one point, she stripped nude in front of customers. And the owner who knew her just, like, kind of helped her out and was like, I'm not going to call the cops, we should just get you out of here.

So she was having a rough, rough time, and nobody really was able to point it out. But getting into kind of like the logic behind it, it's actually really interesting and like kind of, it's kind of like a microcosm of what we were discussing on the last episode where you brought up the fact that a year's tuition in Columbia costs $200. And now it's like, I don't even know what you said, like tens of thousands of dollars. It's $66,000. Yeah. But adjusted for inflation, it should only be $3,000, right? That's what you said? Yeah, exactly.

It just has to do with like how the economy works. these days, which is kind of like, it's all suppositions because you can never totally understand what's going on with people that do stuff like this. There's a book by a guy named Stephen Musako called Beyond Going Postal. And Stephen was a former post office worker. He was a post office he was a lifer. He ended up moving on to, I forgot that name of the exact department within the post office that he moved on to, but it had something to do with like managing. It's like HR stuff, like how to include people's life, like there and work life and all that stuff. His research pointed to the fact that 13% of all worker on worker violence was committed

at the post office in the 1980s, even though the workforce of post office workers was 0.0075%. So it had like a 15, 16x higher rate of workplace violence. violence than any other workplace environment out there in the 1980s. Why? Tell me, tell me why. So his research points to several things. One is that workplace satisfaction was unusually low amongst postal workers compared to any other profession that was out there. But it also had a lot to do with the post office as a branch of the government versus a branch of private enterprise. So one thing to know, is that in the 1970s, I look at this up, the average salary of a household was $7,600.

By that spectrum, just to get a sense, teachers were getting paid $11,600. Doctors were very high paid at $53,000. By comparison, salaries at the post office were about 40% over the national average of $13,500, outpacing wages of other workers. So it was entirely conceivable to not be college educated, not be well-referred, well versed while anything come out of high school you work for 30 40 years at the post office you would earn more than the national average as a medium income and it was at that time enough for you to buy a single family home uh two cars you know vacations with the family and the kids

every summer do they can have a very reasonable normal life and retire with a pension Like with a pension plan, with a 401K, like all the benefits that come from, you know, life at that, in that era. So what happened was that in the 1970, sorry, the background real quick, the U.S. Post Office was a federal agency of until 1970. So up until 1970, it was like what we discussed a long time ago around air traffic controllers, how that was part of the federal. government like you cannot unionize and you cannot strike as part of the federal government that's just part of the like imagine if the air the air force decides you're going to go on strike and it's like we're at war right we're all going to die you can't do it um and so that was a situation here and what happened was that there was complaints about working conditions and all that stuff and so what

happened was that there was an eight-day strike in 1970 that happened and nixon technically was as President of the United States was the end of the line with negotiations on this. And so he ended up approving a bunch of things, approving a bunch of pay raises and all that stuff. But he also said, look, y'all went on strike. It's illegal for you to go on strike. We're going to change this. And he passed what's called the Postal Reorganization Act.

And what that did was now we're going to do is say, if you all want to act like a private enterprise, we're just going to make your private enterprise. So you're not a part of the federal government. You can compete out there in the open. market. And on top of that, you will no longer have a monopoly on mail delivery, which is what gave rise to the birth of UPS, FedEx. I was going to ask you to say that. It does make sense that they would be like, only we can do this until you can't and then now you have all the other things. And can I tell you how annoying it is? Because like we were turning something and had to go to like six

places to get a FedEx person that would take it. Yeah. Yeah. I love a post office. Yeah. But so as part of that, it means that they had to start to start to. keeping track with some regular economy, which I look at this up, the expectations on pay raises for U.S. Postal Service, it's not totally even, but it was somewhere around the 20% pay raise every five years, give or take. So it was very predictable that like people who joined the post office in like the 1960s and like at the very beginning of the 70s, or I mean, even up to like the mid to late 70s is this all started happening in like the 80s really so they expected a certain standard of living they're like hey i was like i hate to put it this way it was like i deserve better

like i was promised this life why can't have this life and all of it boils down to this post reorganization act because what ended up happening was that the whip started kind of cracking on supervisors saying hey we have to be very deliberate and very diligent about the way we're delivering messages packages in the mail and it took away all autonomy and structure it was like you have to hit this many homes on this day starting at this time you know it was very structured right it became like a business it came like a business and they became accountable to like market forces and also because of that they weren't able to get the same amount of pay raises that they were accustomed to so all of a sudden the standard of living of somebody who worked for the post office dropped compared to the rest of

America because you have this giant agency that was now dedicated to paying out pensions and all this stuff to people who had retired forever ago. And FedEx didn't have that. UPS didn't have it. They didn't have overhead that these guys had a deal. It kind of was forced into being a failed entity by virtue of this reorganization act. And so that's part of the reason why people think that the post office has this thing is because all these adults,

who came into the workforce had this understanding of this in my life. It's going to be like they join and realize that, A, I have no leeway in my workflow. Like, can you imagine, like, you have to be at work at 7 a.m. every day. On the dot, dress his way. And you have to pick this up at this time. And every single house you up to head has to be hit within this time window. So you can get back here exactly at 5 o'clock.

Clockout. No. In the middle of recording this podcast, I sort of watch. watching the Gorman doll video. Like it's really crazy. I know. I can't like I hit my friend one of my friends in New York is a school counselor and she's she was a teacher for a long time. We were talking about our jobs and she was like, wait, you can do whatever you want. And I'm like, well, yeah. Like my job is to like, you know, I do stuff and I plan things. But like I don't have a schedule that's like that, you know, and like a teacher does. A teacher on the schedule that's like you have to do this right now

and this right now and this right now. And my schedule is more like I make it and I can. I do something, I can say no. You know, like, I feel very lucky that I don't. People thrive like that, but for me, I'm like, that's not for me. I like to have this possibility. That was one takeaway from this research was that above pay, above status, symbols, or whatever else, people crave autonomy. Like, if you take away complete autonomy and control over someone, they lash out and act

out in ways, like, you're trying to like do something to me. Like, it actually, like, is a pretty good, like, justification for why people choose to be, like, managers. Like, he managers fucking sucks. Like, it's, like, a horrible job. Like, you're accountable, dependable to people and, like, everybody else. Like, the pay usually isn't that great. Like, but you want the autonomy over your life. And that's what they were with this person.

What was his name? I've got his name already. Stephen Musuka, Masako, was saying the ongoing post was like, that's why the post office was, like, that's why the post office was forced into a market condition. way after the time when it could compete with those market conditions and the pressure from above came down on the workers in a way that nobody no other workforce and experienced and that's the reason why there's also rumors that this thing called the zmt machine called the zip machine translator or the letter mail sorter is also a reason why they would go nuts but i don't know it's all speculation wait why do the mail sord order make them crazy because it's a because it's a fast-moving

repetitious action of like zip code this go here zip code this go here like it is people aren't robots and if you make them act like robots it's going to drive them insane and i can't think about worst like i mean the dmv the irs office the post office like i can't think of a more more depressing places to work it's just a gray existence it's so i don't know i couldn't do it so the two best things about living in a small town are the DMV and the post office because you don't have to wait in line. So you're just like the DMV, you can just go in and out. Post office is never anyone there. What time we went to the post office? There were no cars in the front and I walked in and there was no one there in like anything. And there was like a bell and I rang the bell and

the lady like came from the back and she was like, hi. And I was like, are you okay? I was like, blink twice if you're like being robbed because there was like nobody there. And she was like, oh no, I'm just hanging out. It's fine. It's lovely. Okay. Yeah, but we used to live in L.A. and I would go to the post office every now in LA and I was like, dude, fuck this place. Exactly, no, it's lovely in a small town and it is rough everywhere else. Yeah, yeah.

So, but yeah, that's the story. There's so many stats on this. I pulled together a spreadsheet of all the postal shootings. What I wanted to was feed that through chat GPT and have it run a graph or create a graph of like all shootings mixed with like postal shootings

because like I said, like when we think of mass shootings like so much of our thoughts go directly to like somebody opening fire at a festival or like movie theater but it's just not that like it's just not that it is the vast majority is like an idiot got into a fight because someone looked at his girl's butt right like and then pulled a gun like that's it and like happened to have a gun right exactly exactly so but these these are a weird anomaly and they're not slowing down the latest one was in 2022. Wow.

So, yeah, it's still going on. It's still a thing. And the good news is that I read this hilarious thing where the post office put together a research group on postal shootings. And what they said was that a postal worker is no more likely to get shot than a convenience store worker or a taxi driver. And research. What was the most dangerous jobs.

But what was funny was like, research was like, those people get shot by people who are robbing them by other people. get shot by other store employees. Oh, my God. Totally. Yeah, that's crazy. That's really sad that, that, like, job that is so important.

I love mail. Miles just, like, wrote a bunch of letters. I'll mail you one. It says, will you be my friend? I'll mail you one. They're real cute. But I love sending mail to people. I love getting the mail.

It's really important. And it bums me out when people are like, you know, I've seen people in like the government be like, well, the ghost service hasn't made any money. You're like, it's a service. It's not supposed to make money. You know, it's a service to people. No, it does, though. That's the thing. After the Reorganization Act, they were like, if you're going to act like a private enterprise, you have, we're going to make you a private enterprise. So that's the issue. The issue is they actually do have to make money now. But before it was a part of the government agency, they didn't. It was all taxpayer funded.

But, but there's, there's been. been a lot of like really interesting takes on the post office like one of them was that post offices are in a lot of places where banks aren't and one way to help people out who are less advantaged is to put some sort of banking capabilities within the purview of post offices or i know they do money orders and we've talked about like unbanked places before as well or like another example i mean this these are all terrible like another example is food deserts because Because, like, a lot of places, like, also don't have access to good, healthy food. Absolutely.

But, like, how would you? I mean, no, this is one of those things where it feels like either it needs to get put back into under government control or it needs to just revamp itself in a way that it's not so soul-crushing to people. I know. I feel like it's a little bit of both. And, like, also, like, it reminds me, hey, have you seen that terrible movie with Kevin Costner or The Postman? No, I haven't, but I heard a lot about it. It is not as bad as Amelia, but really bad. And I think I remember when it ended, I was so mad.

It's like, you know, four hours of my life. And the ending, I was like, this is so stupid. I'm so mad. But he becomes a postman. And I think the premise is like it's like the apocalypse. And he finds this postman's uniform in like a mail truck. But it's like on like a medical skeleton. Like they didn't even try, you know.

And he like takes it off. like where is it and he like accidentally becomes someone who delivers letters and people really need that and that also happened in the san francisco fire that we just talked about because once the mail started going people were so relieved you know people just like needed that communication to their friends and family they needed to be able to tell people that they were okay like it's something that like such an essential service yeah is it still essential yes i love it please mail me something I don't even know how you use the mail. I'll be honest with you.

I don't use the post office. I know you do. I know you do because you've literally sent me more things in the 15 years I've known you than anybody in my entire life has ever sent me. That's true. I mail me a little thing all the time. I was talking to my friend Julia. Remember that state? Remember the state, that comedy group?

No. They have all sent you. They have a thing where it's like the mailman doesn't deliver him where he puts tacos and everybody's mailboxes and everybody's like, listen to me. And, like, I love the tacos, but I also, like, need to pay my bills. And it's just so funny. And I mailed my friend Julia at taco. Like, not a real one, but like a picture of a taco one time. It just, I love it.

I'm going to mail you something today. Taylor, I'll be honest with you. I don't know how stamps work. And so as a result, I literally only use FedEx because I go to FedEx. And I say, I need to send this somewhere. What do I do with it? And, like, here's a package. And I mean, what do I do now?

It's like, put the address here. And they give me, I'm like, very cool. And I have, like, a book of stamps. I don't know why I bought this. I don't know what the utility of it is. Anyways, that is, I know, a little bit of a light story. It's been a long week for me and a long weekend, so apologies. No, but that's interesting.

And they definitely shouldn't have named that story here, go on postal. And that's sad. You should be safe at work, especially with a job that's not dangerous. You know, like, you know, if you are a pilot on a stunt pilot, you know, fine. But if you are, you know, a post office worker, that sucks. and I'm sorry to hear that about them. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, again, your post-up men is not going to start shooting into your house.

Like, they're only going to each other on. So, like, you're safe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went out last week to check a mailbox, and then the mailman was coming up the street in her truck, and I was embarrassed because I was at the mailbox already, and then we both laughed, and then she used to me by my stuff. Aw, that's fun.

I always weighed my post-person, because I'm like, I'm like, man, thanks for getting in that hot car and just thriving around with the door open. I'll leave them water sometimes. In the summer, I'll put, like, freeze water in the freezer, and I'll put it in the mailbox, so that by the time they get it, it's still cold, because it's just, like, 115, and then you're, as you said, there's no door or no window.

You're so thoughtful. I know. So, yeah, that's our story this week, Taylor. Thank you for indulging my curiosity on postal shootings. Thank you. I will, yeah, I will, ever. If anyone has any other ideas for us, we're at DoomDeafelpod at Gmail.com

and all the socials at DoomDeFillPod. And we will be back next week with more women's history stuff for me. And, you know, whatever. Who knows? Who knows from what for me? Awesome. Thanks, Taylor. Thanks, ours.