*The Mailing

This story is written from the point of view of a dedicated volunteer, salt of the earth, the kind of person all organizations depend upon for free labor. Of course, you always get what you pay for. _SJ

Ladies and gentlemen of the Board of Regents, I stand here eager to tell you what really happened yesterday at the quarterly meeting of the Newsletter Mailing Committee.

Yes. Yes I can explain exactly how the newsletters ended up in the river: I threw them there.

I understand she has addressed you previously? I’ll get right to the facts, then. There’s not much to tell: Her behavior was unacceptable. I refused to accept it. She was unhappy with my refusal. That's all there is to it.

Be more specific? For starters: as we were applying the pre-addressed labels to the newsletters for the mailing, she came upon a label for Jack Martindale. Which she proceeded to tear up.

Mr. Martindale? He retired here, I want to say 1995, 96 maybe, lived in Sunrise Hills, mostly active in the Lions Club? That’s right, that’s him. Wealthy man, very generous to our little non-profit organization too. Anyway, she tore up his label, and I objected.

Her reason for tearing it up? I have no idea. What she said was that we shouldn’t be mailing a newsletter to a dead person. But that is simply not true. Our job as volunteers is to mail newsletters to whoever has a label. I don't care if the person's been dead their whole life. We should not presume they don't want a newsletter anymore.

Oh sure, telling the staff that someone is dead, that’s fine. Let them make the decision to remove the corpse from the label printer. But no staff was present. Phil, as Office Administrator, usually supervises the mailings, but he was home with the flu. In fact, the whole town seemed to have symptoms that day. And the only committee members to show up were her and me.

Yes, I'm getting to what happened next: I fished the torn label out of the garbage and scotch taped it back together, but it was still too messy to mail. So I decided to make my own handwritten one for him. First though, I had to waste valuable time hunting down blank labels. When Mr. Martindale had his own special newsletter once again, I returned to the task at hand. That’s when I noted how, in my absence, without my diligence keeping her to procedure, she had undone almost all our work up ‘til then! Unbelievable! She had taken the rubber banded newsletters which we spent half the morning separating by zip code and instead, she put several banded zip codes all together in one postal basket! Clearly against bulk mailing regulations. Each zipcode is supposed to have a basket of its very own. Even if there are only 5 newsletters in that zipcode.

That was her argument. That it was merely a transportation issue. Once we got the newsletters to the Post Office, that’s when she wanted to separate them into different baskets. She said it would only take an extra minute or two. Well, I’m sorry, that is a shoddy attitude. A customer needs to be ready for action when it’s their turn in line. I believe that charitable organizations, especially, must hold themselves accountable for professional behavior in public.

Umm hmmm, she said the same thing: Postal workers are there to help and the other customers just have to wait their turn. Well, she obviously has a higher threshold for being regarded as a ditzy old lady than I do. I am scrupulous about avoiding any behavior that promotes such stereotyping of my person. And I am always conscious of the reputation of the organization I represent

She would have fussed with me right there at the post office to the embarrassment of our cause. So I grabbed the baskets of newsletters from her and ran to my car. The shrieking as she fell amply illustrates her penchant for creating scenes.

I am indeed aware I banged into a couple of vehicles in the post office parking lot, but what could I do? I had to get the newsletters away from her! My plan was to return later, to mail them out properly by myself. But that…that madwoman began chasing me with her car! A few blocks later, she forced me off River Road, so after hitting the tree, I took off on foot with the newsletters under my arms.

The witnesses are correct. I wasn’t going to mention it because I didn’t think it was that important. However, I did tuck one small bunch of them in my undergarments, which I thought was quick thinking on my part. Unfortunately, she caught up at the picnic area and tackled me to the ground. She made both of us look ridiculous, but I didn’t care about my dignity anymore, or my injuries or even my undies. The only thing that mattered were the newsletters, which I managed to retain possession of. At that point, the only alternative for giving them to her, even half of them as she suggested, was the river. I got to my feet, made the short sprint to its banks, and saved them from her clutches once and for all.

Frankly, I'm surprised you don't screen volunteers better.