Post Office Redux: Return to Sender

    One thing I've learned in my job is there is almost no connection between columns I'm excited about, columns I've worked hard on, and columns that interest readers. 
     Monday's column, for instance, on waiting at the post office, was purely a matter of timing — I needed to write something, and had just experienced the long wait at the post office. It was what I think of as "a duck in a bucket" -- an easy target, sitting at my feet, softly quacking, waiting to be blasted. You can't miss.
     I was almost embarrassed to write it. Had you asked me to gauge reader reaction ahead of time, I'd have guessed, perhaps a bit of chiding, for plucking such low hanging fruit. 
     Wrong. Dozens of emails. Gratitude. Amazement. Delight. At least 50. Everyone had a story or a thought to share, such as this, from Dennis Quinn:

I walked into the Tinley Park post office a few months ago and there was no queue and a clerk behind the counter. She was the only clerk on duty. She was doing what seemed to be some sort of administrative work. She looked up, saw me and immediately put the next window sign in front of herself. There wasn't any one else there! It was truly a WTF moment. After a few minutes, she removed the sign and said "Next please." Pure hell. 

    Several mentioned poor command of the English language, or rudeness, including clerks who were rude with their mouths full of food.  Much indifference. Several readers relayed stories of post offices running out of stamps.  Jack Costello wrote: 

     It reminded me of my experience 10 days before Christmas. I went to the Elmhurst Post Office and waited about 20 minutes to get international stamps. When my turn came, the gal told me they were out of international stamps. I phoned Villa Park USPS and they also were out of international stamps. It seems no one knew there would be a rush before Christmas. I phoned Melrose Park USPS on Lake Street and YES, they had the stamps.
     I quickly got over to Melrose Park and got the stamps. I couldn't help but notice there were 3 employees working the counter and I was the only customer.
     In Elmhurst, there are rarely more than 2 employees working the windows and the lines are usually back to the entrance. I often see employees chatting in the back while customers wait 20 minutes or more.
     There is obviously no coordination of manpower needs or product inventory between nearby branch offices. As I told the Elmhurst gal, "No wonder you people are going broke" 

     A few readers came to the defense of the post office. Thomas Evans wrote:

     Funny column today, but I tend to bridle at P.O. bashing. For the record, the clerks at my local Office are friendly and curteous, and I seldom have to wait more than five minutes.  I suspect the experience may differ in the city.
     My soft spot for the USPS goes back to college days, when I worked as a part time mailman during Christmas vacations. I've never worked harder, and once got fired for exceeding delivery time standards. Also, I think of one of my literary heroes, Anthony Trollope, who managed to write 56 still readable novels working four hours early every morning before reporting to his day job as a high official at Her Majesty's Post Office. He also set up the postal service in Ireland.
     There is a fiction that the USPS is an independent government entity set up to be run like a business, but meddling by its Congressional overseers really makes that impossible.  I expect service at the Merchandise Mart will improve after your column. The power of the press.

     I was pleased by Tom's Trolllope reference. A nice bit of literariness.  Though it was this witty addition, from Charles Berg, that made me think I should post a few:

    As you may be aware, various nations now issue stamps with no inscribed denomination — but are marked as paying the fee for a certain postal service [e.g., a first-class letter] at any future date, regardless of the cost on that later date. Canada calls such issues "Permanent" stamps, which bear a white letter "P" shown against a red stylized maple leaf. While waiting in a long line at my local post office recently, it struck me that the "Forever" notation used by the USPS may be a reflection of the time it takes to get service at a USPS station these days. 

     I should point out that  I did phone the Chicago branch of the postal service before running this. I like to give my columns a news angle, and not just wax comedic, and had a question I thought might mitigate the problems I saw at the Merchandise Mart: I suspected that the post office, with its chronic funding woes, is understaffed. It wouldn't do to mock an organization struggling to survive, doing its best under constraints -- I know what that's like.  So I phoned Mark Reynolds, the Chicago USPS spokesman, whom I've dealt with in the past and is unusually candid and personable, for a government PR functionary. Reynolds said that no, staffing is fine, which sort of makes it worse. He too wrote me on Tuesday, with clarity and sense, and we'll give him the last word, nearly: 

    We had such a lovely chat Friday afternoon, I’m rather surprised you didn’t include any of my information in today’s piece.

     I do wish you’d asked me about “security theater.” That’s not an idle exercise, we are required to ask that question of every piece presented for mailing, for the protection of the general mail stream and the vehicles - including commercial airplanes - that transport it, as well as our customers, employees and facilities.

     Our clerks ask the other questions because customers don’t always know which mailing option and/or additional service is right for what they’re sending. And it never hurts to ask if there’s anything they might need.

     While I understand the frustration with waiting so long to be served, Post Office lobbies are far from Kafka-esque, as indicated by the mobile retail scanners I mentioned in our interview. Even if the wait is longer than we aim for, they’re anything but hellish. And by using the tools at usps.com, customers can pay for postage and arrange a free package pickup 24 hours a day – no waiting required!

    I’d like to take you up on that offer to do a follow-up piece to this. I might even be able to meet you…back at Merchandise Mart.

     I told him I'd be happy to do any kind of follow-up. I also snapped the above photo Wednesday, walking past the Merchandise Mart station.  So much for Tom Evans' theory about the power of the press.

Make the most of every minute: wait at the post office

  Among the theoretical questions people sometimes pose to themselves — if my house were burning down, what would I grab? If I won millions in the lottery, what would I buy? — is the classic, “If I had one day to live, what would I do?”

     People usually say they’d spend their last moments with family or in the embrace of a loved one. Unimaginative. Me, I know exactly where I would rush: to the nearest post office. There, each minute would be long, if not endless, and deeply felt. Plus, when my end finally came, I would be eager to go.

     I had a couple of packages to send this week, and while in my old age I have learned to weigh them, slap on proper postage and just drop them off, thus escaping the eternal limbo of waiting, I had run out of dollar stamps and figured I would slide by the postal service station in the Merchandise Mart.

    Seven people in line. Normally I’d spin around and leave. But I had to get this in the mail. How long could it take? I chose to wait. The lone clerk was helping a customer with the slowness of a deep-sea diver defusing a bomb at the bottom of an ocean of honey.

     But another clerk setting up.
     Ah, reinforcements, I thought, hope dawning. The clerk got her station ready, and slid back a glass partition, just as the other clerk finished her transaction. Her customer turned to flee, and at that moment the working clerk spun 180 degrees and walked away as the new clerk announced to us, "May I help you?" As if there were some postal rule against two clerks working at the same time.  
     "You know," I said to the woman in front of me, "The post office is the one place where tea party dogma about tearing down the government starts to make sense."
     "This is actually a good one," she said in flat voice. "The others are worse. The people here are nice . . ."
     The new clerk suddenly left, so there was nobody behind the counters.
     " . . . when they're here," the woman continued.
     Nobody was just buying a stamp or weighing a letter. They all had complex transactions - certified, insured letters to foreign addresses. They fell to protracted conversations about different stamps, just out of earshot, the clerk holding up one sheet, then another. One woman asked about having something notarized, and the clerk began to explain at length why she couldn't do that.
     As I neared the front, the line slowed. Time itself seemed to slow. Finally, I got to the front. "I want to mail this book."
     Not so fast. First, security theater: Any of my articles liquid, fragile, potentially hazardous such as lithium batteries?
     "It's a book."
     Do I need insurance, tracking, receipt confirmation? A blur of services offered.
     "No, thank you."
     I'm beginning to see the problem here. It isn't just that the system is slow and the staff indifferent — seemingly indifferent; I'm sure postal workers are very nice people who would care if only it weren't against the rules, if only they weren't trapped in some Kafka-esqe machine, forced to repeated litanies of rare perils and unwanted services. The book was finally stamped. I set my second package, a poster tube, on the scale.
     The woman turned and wordlessly walked away again. I could feel the line shift and groan behind me. It was then I realized, given a choice, I would spend my last moments on earth here. In fact, I think I am; some part of me never left the post office. I'm still standing there. The comforting thought is this: At least when I do die and go to hell, what I find there won't come as a surprise. Hell is a post office with, maybe, flames.

If you think you've never failed, you just did

    Before we shake off the trial of Steve Mandell—the ex-cop lowlife convicted of plotting to kidnap and torture a local businessman to extort money from him before murdering him—with a shiver of disgust, like a dog after a bath, we should pause and use the case to remind us what a bad state's attorney Cook County has in Anita Alvarez.

    Compare how the feds took down Mandell with how she botched the NATO 3 trial. Both defendents were accused, basically, of the same thing: planning to do something awful. Neither had actually done anything, yet. First they were very different types of defendants: Mandell was a stone cold killer who had already been on Death Row and was thought to have been responsible for some half a dozen murders. While the NATO 3 were a trio of stoners from Florida who had never done much of anything, good, bad or indifferent. 

    One was methodically preparing to commit a hideous crime. Nobody who listened to the FBI tapes of Mandell gloating over his torture chamber could doubt that he intended to follow through his plan—the jury took just four hours to find him guilty. While the ridiculous evidence scraped up the by Chicago police, capped by the farcical image of their undercover Inspector Clouseau and his sidekick in fake mustaches hanging out at the Heartland Cafe, getting the lowdown from whatever aging hippie stopped by for a cup of bancha tea, was surpassed only by their how-stupid-do-they-think-we-are testimony.  The cops obviously stood by, cheering on the NATO goofs, prodding and guiding them through constructing molotov cocktails that no impartial person could imagine they intended to eventually light and hurl at anyone, never mind a cop. The jury certainly couldn't. 

    The most telling thing, after a jury held its nose and handed her case back to her, after rejecting the most serious charges, was that Alvarez, like bad prosecutors everywhere, doubled down. Doubt never creased her brow. She had learned nothing, she proudly announced, and would charge the NATO 3 again in heartbeat, given the chance.

    "I would bring them again tomorrow with no apologies and no second-guessing," she angrily told reporters. I believe her, and when the next paltry case makes headlines, where Alvarez is diverting scarce public law enforcement funds into her newest dubious prosecution, we'll know she's a woman of her word, unfortunately.

     There's nothing wrong with making a mistake. Everyone does it. What is loathsome is to make mistakes and then deny they are mistakes, out of ego. Prosecutors have to believe in their cases, true, and you wouldn't want a state's attorney to fold up and surrender every time a jury ruled against them. But you see how prosecutors, again and again, subvert justice by ignoring clear evidence that the defendants they are harrying are in fact innocent.  And Alvarez has already made a name for herself —committing "political suicide" was how it was described at the time—by defending the indefensible, sometimes on national TV.
     If you are curious as to whether you are a  thinking adult, or an incompetent jerk, the easiest way to find out is to take this little test. Ask yourself what mistakes you've made, what things you've done that you are sorry you did and would not do again. If those come easily, if you have a long list, if they present themselves like a class of eager 2nd graders waving stretching their arms into the air and going "Oh! Oh! Oh!" then you're probably okay. If you can parse your missteps with genuine curiosity, and not with the kneejerk defensiveness that causes people to cling to errors and become the ball of shameful buffoonery that Alvarez is, then you're probably a professional and good at what you do. But if you can't admit that you've done anything wrong—and everyone has—then you probably should do some soul searching, although, the ironic thing is, you probably can't. 
      Everyone is fallible—people err and, ironically, the more we deny it, the more we probably dwell in error. Don't be like that. Own your failures. Be open to the idea that you aren't perfect and sometimes do things you shouldn't. Not as a pre-made excuse or a show of false humility. But because you believe it, and you might as well, because it's true, and the alternative is really ugly. You'll notice nobody ever talks about Anita Alvarez running for mayor, or any other office. Bad enough we have to endure her as state's attorney, prosecuting poor women for stealing loaves of bread. She's been on the downward slope for years. Someone should tell her; not that it would do any good.

      

Saturday fun: where is this?

     
    When all of our reading matter is finally stored on electronic devices, we won't need all these books jamming our shelves. Which I suppose might be a good thing, or have its good aspects—from a housekeeping point of view, for instance. Less dusting. 
      That is the brave, you-might-as-well-be-glad-about-what's-going-to-happen-whether-you-like-it-or-not view. Though speaking for myself, I will miss books. A person's library speaks volumes about who they are (sorry, the mindset of yesterday's pun column lingering...)  When I walk into someone's home or, in this case, their office, my eye is immediately drawn to their books. First, because I'm glad they have them — not everybody does — and second because I'm interested in what those books are. Sometimes a person's books indict them—junk fiction, dare-to-win self-help swill, stuff that makes the heart sink. And sometimes books compliment their owners and intrigue guests. As someone who has an entire shelf of books selected purely for their off-beat topics—Snow in America by Bernard Mergen next to to a pair of volumes both titled Ice (one, by Marina Gosnell, subtitled The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance, the other, by Karal Ann Marling, Great Moments in the History of Hard, Cold Water) I admired this collection of useful volumes that I noticed Friday when I spent a pleasant 90 minutes visiting ... well, maybe I shouldn't say. Maybe I should be coy, and leave you hanging about exactly where these books are shelved, and make it into a puzzle.  In the office of a beloved institution that has been in operation a long, long time, one located within 15 minutes of my house in Northbrook, one whose director could be expected to own books such as these. 
      Who would have such a collection? The first reader to email me the answer at dailysteinberg@gmail.com, will receive one of my limited edition blog posters as a prize, and I'll share the answer here as soon as someone figures it out. 

    That was fast. A half hour after midnight, Lynne Arons guessed Wagner Farm. The books are in the office of director Todd Price, an eighth generation Iowa farmer who left the family farm to run the 18-acre Glenview institution. I was there Friday researching a Sunday piece that will run in the Sun-Times this spring. Thanks to everyone for playing—a lot of people suspected the Chicago Botanic Garden, as well as places like weatherman Tom Skilling's office or that of WGN farm reporter Orion Samuelson.  Next time I'll try to find something a little harder to figure out. 

Photo atop blog -- Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 

Company with a punny name earns big payday

     

     ‘He that would pun, would pick a pocket,” Alexander Pope wrote nearly 300 years ago, and the taint of the disreputable clings to wordplay as strongly now as it did then.
     Particularly when it comes to business. Double entendres are the realm of hot dog stands (“The Wiener’s Circle”) hair salons (“Curl Up and Dye”) and dog groomers (“Pet-a-Cure”). There is inevitably a sense of tinyness, of someone’s flicker of a dream puffed into momentary life. Bad enough to pour your life savings and hard work into a yarn shop, but to name it “Ewe and Me Fiber Studio,” well, the heart breaks.     You would never expect a major company to name itself after a pun. “The U.S. government today placed an order for 22 of the new stealth fighters manufactured by Fly By Night Industries...” Even automobile companies — car names are a blizzard of numbers and letters and animal names and geographic terms, so many they seem to risk draining the dictionary of nouns — draw the line at puns. There is no Chevy Rollon, no Ford Runwell. Nobody would buy a Honda Mushroom van. (Get it, “much room.” No? You’re a tough audience ...)
     Thus an extra unsettling dimension was added to the news that not only is everybody’s favorite way to show off lunch and brag about grandkids — Facebook — spending $19 billion on a text messaging application, but the company behind the application is called WhatsApp.
     WhatsApp? Not much, whatsapp with you?
     My immediate reaction - "That's billion? With a B?"— underplays the sense of dislocation the news brought. Like you, I had never even heard of WhatsApp, nevermind used it. While there is no question a sense of playfulness in the whole computer world — Apple Computer got its name because Steve Jobs was on a fruit cleanse and had just visited an orchard — the fact is, people are spending an unfathomable amount of money on a company with a name that sounds like an Abbott & Costello comedy bit.
     WhatsApp was founded in 2009 in Mountain View, Calif., by two former Yahoo executives, Jan Koun and Brian Acton. ("Yahoo" isn't exactly "International Business Machine" either, but at least it isn't a pun). It has 55 employees, which means Facebook is spending a third of a billion dollars per WhatsApp employee, the idea being by absorbing this service, which is like Twitter, it'll better hang onto its 1.2 billion users.
     Facebook would be smarter to send each user 10 bucks, as thanks for spending the time we do pouring our data into Facebook and keeping each other entertained. The Chicago Sun-Times pays me good money to air my thoughts and parse my likes on its website and in print. Facebook gets it for free in the increasingly strained and dubious notion that having a big hive of Facebook pals somehow reflects value back onto the newspaper. Obviously Facebook thinks WhatsApp brings something that makes up for its lack of that necessary apostrophe.
     Yes. During cataclysms, it's easier to focus on something small, manageable — the company name, the apostrophe — and not that Facebook, for its gizmo, just paid 76 times what Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post. The Smithsonian used to have a Hall of Journalism that made my profession seem like a Tom Clancy novel. Last time I visited, the Hall was gone, and what few artifacts didn't go into storage had been folded into a data processing exhibit. It was like going to the National Gallery and finding the John Singer Sargent portraits moved to an exhibit about the history of paint.
     Give them credit. A pun is its own marketing campaign. "It gives people the idea that we're lighthearted," said Krysten Fane, manager at the Barking Lot, which has two locations, in Chicago and Deerfield. "They hear it and they giggle. It helps us sit in their brain a little bit. It's great for advertising and repeat customers. It says, 'We take our job seriously but we love the dogs and know this is about letting dogs have fun.' "
     So the Barking Lot is a kennel? I asked.
     "Day care, grooming, training, all-natural products," she said. "All Your Dog Needs Under one Woof." Didn't see that coming.
     Actually, "Apple Computers" was, if not quite a pun, then a bit of a word puzzle.
     "It doesn't quite make sense," said Mike Markkula, Apple's first chairman. "So it forces your brain to dwell on it. Apples and computers, that doesn't go together! So it helped us grow brand awareness."
     In addition, Steve Jobs once said, it put Apple ahead of Atari in the phone book.
     So maybe WhatsApp has a future. And if smartphones come with a port to facilitate its use, they can call it the WhatsApp Dock.

Rahm Emanuel: the nature of the beast

     When Esquire phoned at the end of October and asked me to profile Rahm Emanuel, I was both excited and slightly dubious. The last article they asked me to do never saw the light of day, and I told the mayor that we might go through the whole process and end up with nothing in the magazine. But he was game, and it wasn't like I could say No. It's Esquire. I spent four days with the mayor, and while I didn't feel like I exactly saw a candid slice of his working life—we spent a lot of time doing fuzzy activities such as reading to kindergarten classes and cutting ribbons at tot lots— I got to know him a little, to the degree that he can be known.  It was a ton of work -- a very busy November, December and part of January — but it ended up nine full pages in the magazine. I learned much, got a chance to speak with people — David Axelrod, Garry McCarthy, Karen Lewis — I hadn't spoken with in depth before, and am satisfied with how it turned out. A few things didn't end up in the article that I wish were there — such as a fleeting encounter with the ever charmless Rich Daley — but I suppose those will find their way into print eventually.

     Sister Rosemary Connelly was not pleased with the mayor of Chicago. The head of Misericordia, a beloved home to 600 people with Down syndrome and other disabilities, the eighty-three-year-old nun might not at first glance seem to be in a position to carry much influence over city politics. But this is Chicago, and Misericordia offers gold-plated care in a state notorious for its nightmarish residential institutions. The children and siblings of the powerful—politicians, TV anchors, lawyers, developers—are cared for there, and an A-list of Chicago’s leadership arrives on command, on bended knee and with an open checkbook.

     It was 2011, and the City of Chicago had to bridge a massive budget deficit. Before he was even sworn into office, the mayor had announced that churches and social services would have to pay for the water from Lake Michigan like everybody else. With a stroke of the mayor’s pen, Misericordia’s water bill would go from zero to $350,000 a year. Sister Rosemary invited the mayor to speak to her fundraising breakfast. To his great credit, he showed up.

     In his benediction, Misericordia’s Father Jack Clair felt inspired to bring a visual aid, a glass of water, to hold up and say, “Thank you, God, for the gift of water.” Then he paused. “Oh,” he said, looking at the mayor, “it’s not a gift anymore.”

    At his turn to speak, the mayor returned fire. “I thought Jewish mothers had a corner on the market as it relates to guilt,” he said. The issue lingered, and two years later, when he appeared at a Special Olympics breakfast at the lush University Club, he spoke about the hard decisions that reality forces on leaders and about that time he made everybody pay for water, including Sister Rosemary, who was sitting in the audience. As soon as he finished speaking, he strode directly over to her and gave her a big hug. In a city known for political brawling, the mayor is a bastard’s bastard, profoundly profane and epically vindictive. But this was not a fight he relished. Give him a ward heeler or a senator or a president, no problem. But a nun?

     “You know what the mayor says about me?” she had told the table, minutes before, smiling beatifically, her pleasant, deeply lined face ringed with an angelic halo of white hair. “He says, ‘Sister, you scare the shit out of me.’

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Facebook checks your pants

     "Language is power,” the feminist British writer Angela Carter wrote, and it’s true. Words represent concepts that can shake our world. 

     This week a new word certainly shook mine. I was noodling around Facebook, encountered a term I wasn’t familiar with, found the definition, then hurried downstairs, where my wife was in the kitchen baking banana chocolate chip muffins.

     “I have an announcement!” I said, with well-practiced grandiosity. “One that I think will explain a lot that has gone on in our relationship over the years. I am coming out of the closet. I am . . . cisgendered. I am a proud cisgendered male.”

     She paused, mixing bowl in the crook of her arm, wooden spoon in hand, looked at me, her face placid. Then returned to mixing. She was not taking the bait. OK, OK, I told her, Facebook now gives its billion members not just the choice of familiar “male” and “female” genders to identify themselves as, but 50, count ’em, 50 alternatives, many I had never heard of — “agender” and “pangender” and “non-binary” — but could at least roughly figure out.

     Then there was “cisgender,” which made no sense at all, as it turned out. I checked the dictionary. Nothing. Then Wikipedia, which defines it as “where an individual’s experience of their own gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth.” In other words, someone who is born a boy, in possession of a penis and then cleaves to the realm of traditional maleness, such as it is.

     “My God,” I thought, “that’s . . . that’s me.”
     And let me tell you, it feels so good to get that out, to reveal my true self. Finally, a burden has been lifted. . . .
     Sorry. I can’t even have momentary fun aping the victim envy that ignorant people indulge in. Can’t wink at the theater of coming out without recognizing the widespread human tragedy that makes it necessary. That is: It’s easy to be the norm. With our frisson over gay marriage, with religious conservatives hot to portray our country as some sinkhole of anything-goes depravity, the fact is, most people who stray off the narrow path of the ordinary — blue trucks for boys, pink ribbons for girls — step off a cliff into a realm of woe. The usual stuff that we straights expect — say, go to school without torture — is up in the air.
     Homosexual men and lesbians have, after long struggle, finally established themselves being bona fide members of the human race, nearly, whose participation in regular human activities, such as getting married and raising families, should no longer be thwarted by the anxious sex-averse puritanical wasp’s nest that we call our society. Not everyone has gotten the message, however. Some still sit in the stands chanting for a fifth quarter, though the game is over and the rest of us are heading for the exits.
     Now the question is whether the transgender world, those who identify themselves along a spectrum of mind-twisting complexity as reflected in Facebook’s 50 terms, will be able to piggyback on the success of gays and slip through the door into acceptability that gays have jammed their foot in.
     The answer, at least based on Facebook’s action, seems to be a tentative yes. “Cisgender,” as far as I can tell, is a half-clever term cooked up so the opposite of “transgender” isn’t “normal.” And why not? The trans world is a far smaller sliver than the gay/lesbian world, and will no doubt feel the wrath of frustrated religious types looking for a group upon which to shower disapproval. We’ve already seen anti-bullying measures opposed on the insane grounds that kids being bullied are often transgender kids.
     As with many subcultures, the trans world places much emphasis on fine distinctions. So I phoned the contact listed by GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, for “Transgender Media Inquiries” to make sure I’m not calling hellfire upon myself through some faux pas (noticing that they seem to violate their own guideline, “Transgender should be used as an adjective, not as a noun.” In that case, wouldn’t “Transgender Media Inquiries” describe inquiries from the transgender media? Which I assume doesn’t need GLAAD to help navigate this ever-shifting labyrinth).
    Back on Facebook, I tried to plug “Married” into gender — not technically a sex, true, but the term speaks to my condition. No go. Just as well. The idea that Facebook, a medium for showing off your dinner, your Caribbean rental and your kids, should suddenly grab at our collective crotch and demand we pick what team we’re batting for from a huge laundry list of proclivities — that seems a bridge too far. I struck the category from my page.