dual personalities

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

— W. H. Auden, from “Night Mail”

I am in a fight with the campus mail: I have most definitely been forgotten.

I may have mentioned that my program’s offices recently moved buildings, and I am responsible for getting everything set up. Now, some of this responsibility has been fun. I have done a lot of furniture shopping and can wield our Amazon account with reckless abandon a reasonable amount of independence. On the other hand, I’ve had to coordinate with some of the most frustrating branches of campus, such as Facilities Management. You wouldn’t believe the ineptitude, except you would.

But my funniest encounter has been with campus mail services. When I called them to explain that our program office “address” has changed, and we need to set up mail delivery, I was met with utter disgust. I received a series of monologues along the lines of: “We can’t just ADD a mail stop like that. Do you know how hard our mail carriers work? One person can’t do that much work!” I never assumed one person was carrying all of the mail all of the places on campus, sir. “None of the other programs have their own addresses. Everything goes to a central office and you sort it yourselves.” That is patently untrue. “Amazon has wreaked HAVOC on this campus. Do you know how many different carriers they employ? That mess with our process? We are responsible for the FEDERAL POSTAL SERVICE and nothing else. I can’t speak to you about Amazon.” OK, I’m on board with rants about Amazon. “If you really believe that you cannot function without campus mail services, then you’re going to have to take this up with my boss.” Um, GLADLY? In what universe is a customer threatened with the equivalent of “May I speak to your manager”?

This disgruntled university employee was not, it’s clear to me, a “Jolly Postman.”

Perhaps he feels closer to Henry David Thoreau, who said, “I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.”

*Title from Calvin and Hobbes