going postal!

Sigrid runs a small business with her husband and relies heavily on the efficiency of the local postal service to make a living.

"You name it," sighs Sigrid, "those petty little postal worker have done it to us. I don't know whether they want to bankrupt us, run us out of town, or drive us mad - but right now they've just about achieved all three possibilities."

"We send and receive a great deal of mail -- our business depends on it," explains Sigrid, "and as much as we'd like to dispense with the postal service completely and use a courier service instead, we just can't afford to do it -- we're stuck with a lousy service that's subsidized by our taxes and yours!"

"Don't get me wrong," adds Sigrid, "it's our local postal service that stinks, not the system, and not everyone in this town is as hopping mad as we are."

"It's personal," sighs Sigrid. "The woman who manages the local postal service hates my guts and because her underlings are stupid, or just want to keep their jobs, they follow her lead in treating us -- well, me rather than my husband -- badly."

"About five years ago I estimated that two percent of the mail we send and receive just doesn't get delivered," says Sigrid. "I raised the matter with the manager and that was the start of the battle."

"The next week, we received no mail at all!"

"Can you imagine a government employee - a so-called public servant - actually withholding our mail in revenge for making a complaint about lousy service?"

"OK," laughs Sigrid, "I know that you can't beat City Hall and Uncle Sam is out to get all of us, but this is an abuse of power gone stark raving mad."

"The following week our mail was delivered and a lot of the envelopes had been opened and stuck with tape," says Sigrid. "This wasn't done carefully, to hide the fact that our mail had been tampered with, but blatantly and roughly as if to tell us that we are powerless."

"My husband and I confronted the manager with the offending mail and she called in three staff members as witnesses and told us that we needed to see a psychiatrist!"

"They were sniggering at us - like jackals - and it really was like trying to deal with members of a sub-human species."

"I know that postal workers don't earn much money and some of them really do have the intelligence of cretins," laughs Sigrid, "but put a little bit of power into the hands of people like that and they turn into the stuff of nightmares."

"My husband folded completely and blamed me for doing something to upset the manager," says Sigrid. "Just like a man, right?"

"Faced with a situation where I had to deal with the local postal service every day, whether I liked it or not, I decided to resolve half of the problem by driving to the next town to do business with the postal service and post the mail."

"Sure, it was inconvenient," laughs Sigrid, "but at least I avoided contact with the petty tyrants in my town."

"As far as receiving mail is concerned," says Sigrid, "we are still up the creek. I can't prove that the local postal workers are deliberately destroying our mail or failing to deliver it on time, so it's a case of having to wear the situation or get out of town."

"I'm normally an assertive woman and politically active as far as human rights are concerned," says Sigrid, 'but this situation on my own little bit of turf has become an exercise of mental torture and abuse of power that you wouldn't believe could happen here. In some third world country, maybe, but not here!"

"I mean, we go to war on the other side of the world to depose a tyrant like Saddam Hussein and yet empower people like him in our own postal service."

"Having been through this experience I can understand how whole nations of people - including the intelligentsia - can be tyrannized."

"I had to front up at the local postal service last week to pick up a parcel," says Sigrid, "and I actually found that my palms were sweating and my knees were knocking!"

"I was terrified at the prospect of bumping into that woman or one of the sniveling underlings who had previously humiliated us."

"As I walked into the office I caught a glimpse of that woman and, seeing me, she came out and tried to make eye contact with me in order to intimidate me further than I was already!"

"She walked straight for the counter I was heading for," laughs Sigrid, "and I actually prayed that the counter assistant would attend to me before she got there."

"I kept my eyes down the whole time, refusing to look in her direction," adds Sigrid, "and I felt like a naughty little girl in the presence of God or something."

"When the counter assistant went out back to get my parcel, she followed him and my heart skipped a beat - with good reason," sighs Sigrid, "because he came back and told me that he couldn't find the parcel."

"I was forced to visit the postal service three times that week before the parcel materialized," says Sigrid. "And each time I walked into that office I became progressively more demoralized and terrified."

"I truly believe that she deliberately held that parcel until she was satisfied that she had broken my spirit."

"If a postal worker can do this to me," laughs Sigrid, "imagine what a police officer could do!"