April 29, 2009 | lists

As we noted in Part I of this list, the clock is ticking on several occupations—actually, in this digital age, clocks no longer tick and if you work in a factory that produces ticking clocks, well you’re about to get a whole bunch of flashing midnights on all your digital equipment… The point is some occupations, such as travel agent and postal worker, have been increasingly replaced by hitting ‘enter’ on your keyboard, while others have also seen their numbers dwindle as more people go online to do things other than dating groups for those who have been struck by lightning (real estate agents should be looking over their shoulder pads).

Postcards, which don’t arrive until well after your plane has touched down, might fill their bags in the winter months, but with more people affixing ‘no junk mail’ notices to their doors, it’s unlikely those ‘free delivery with orders over $20’ pamphlets will be able to sustain the postal profession.

This is too bad, because they’ve contributed much to pop culture and their absence will be surely missed. In the future when someone shoots up a bunch of strangers, we’ll have to say he went “deranged, socially ostracized teenager who plays too many video games”, instead of “he went postal”, and it doesn’t have the same ring. And besides, the brown coveralls and shorts of the UPS guy are no match for the jaunty cap and smile. Here, we doff our caps to the contented mailman whose mail slot reflexes are tested every time a pit bull answers the door, who brave not only rain sleet and snow but the occasional hail of bullets trudging through crummy neighborhoods and whose contributions often go unnoticed when they’re not being made fun of in list form. Here are the first five in our Top 10 Pop Culture Postal Workers.

5. Postman Pat. Aimed at preschoolers (a demographic ten years younger than those who might find King of Queens funny), this animated classic focuses on the exploits of the eponymous character, with his red van and black and white cat in the English village of Greendale (not to be confused with the confusing Neil Young rock opera of the same name). The show has graced HBO, NBC, BBC, airs in over 20 countries and 12 million books have been sold. It’s fitting that the series employs ‘stop motion’ techniques, as there are few professions so slow-moving that an illusion of movement has to be created.

4. The Son of Sam, serial killer David Berkowitz. Immortalized in the movie Summer of Sam, which does for Italian Americans what mustaches, mozzarella and organ grinders did for them in the early days of cinema, the movie features the Spike Lee Joint stock-in-trade: at least 80 key characters, running length of well over two hours and cinematography grainier than 80s porno. David Berkowitz was an NYC postal worker at the time of his arrest, so it’s not too big a stretch that he thought dogs were possessed by the devil.

“If he had not been a serial killer,” a New York Times reporter masquerading as a high school guidance counselor stated, “Mr. Berkowitz said he probably would have ended up ‘married with a wife and kids in the suburbs, making a living, working in the post office.’

3. Charles Bukowski. The Poet Laureate of Skid Row was a mail sorter for the US Postal Service in LA, and the novel that put him on the map, Post Office begins with a less than kind summation of his experience there:

“It began as a mistake. It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up on the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody.”

Along with postal sorting system that would confuse that computer they always get to play major chess players, terrible working conditions, and the threat of constant mauling, Bukowski also apparently had it worse than his others, taking shifts when crap weather kept others at home: “Reporting time was 5am and I was the only drunk there. I always drank until past midnight, and there we’d sit, at 5am, waiting to get on the clock, waiting for some regular to call in sick. The regulars usually called in sick when it rained or during a heatwave or the day after a holiday when the mail load was doubled.”

2. Newman, Seinfeld (as portrayed by Wayne Knight). Seinfeld’s un-neighborly nemesis, Newman was also apparently a co-worker of David Berkowitz. Newman’s workplace contributions included paying someone to work his route, routinely taking sick days (especially during precipitation) , and withholding the mail as a form of blackmail. Lazy, scheming, and out of shape despite the legwork required, Newman, apparently responsible for several federal crimes in his deportment of his duties,  compares delivering 50% of the mail to running a three-minute mile and is known for his Marshall McLuhan-esque declaration:

“When you control the mail, you control … information.”

1. Cliff Clavin, Cheers (as portrayed by John Ratzenberger).  The quintessential bar bore, Cliff’s usually misleading or entirely inaccurate utterances were always prefaced with “it’s a little known fact that” and then followed by “the harp is a precursor the modern guitar. It seems the minstrels were very large people” or “the ancient pyramids were actually the first postal depots.” Cliff Clavin did more for negative portrayals of the occupation than anyone on this list, which is saying something in that we’ve included a serial killer. In one episode, as a practical joke, a chimp dressed in US Postal Service garb delivers the mail in his stead. In other episodes, Clavin, a virginal mailman who lives with his mom, pitches awful late night TV monologue jokes, loses all his winnings on Jeopardy! with his infamous final round “Who are people who haven’t been in my kitchen?” and tries to garner interest in a presidential-looking rutabaga. To show his dedication to the trade, Clavin passed on marrying the love of his life in one episode because that would have entailed moving up north, and working for — terror of terrors — Canada Post. His occupation was mined for more comic material than the equivalent of about 4 postings here, and for this reason, the mustachioed mail carrier lands in our number one mail slot.

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1. 
   At 5:59 pm Louis Kairys said:

   You missed the Merry Mailman, Ray Hetherton (Joey’s Father). He was big on the radio and television in the fifties.

   Reply