How to Be Alone : Essays

Lost In The Mail

The fall of the Chicago post office began before the public could see the portents: before the undead letters rose up in every corner of the city to haunt the guilty management — a hundred sacks of months-old mail in the back of a North Side letter carrier’s truck, two hundred pounds of fresh mail burning underneath a South Side viaduct, more than fifteen hundred pieces of mail moldering in a shallow grave beneath a West Side porch, and a truck-load of mail and parcels in the closets of a Chicago carrier’s suburban condo. The fall began on Thursday, January 20, 1994, at about two in the afternoon, when a woman named Debra Doyle called the manager of her local station and told him that her family had not received mail since the previous Thursday.

Over the years, Doyle had come to expect poor service from the Uptown station, which served her neighborhood. Two-and three-day hiatuses in delivery no longer surprised her. But an entire week without mail, even a very cold week in January, seemed extreme. On the telephone, the station manager, Thomas Nichols, explained to Doyle that his carriers could not deliver the mail because their trucks wouldn’t start. He said that if Doyle wanted her mail she would have to get it from him at the station. Perhaps Nichols didn’t think that Doyle would actually venture out in the subzero weather, but after speaking to him she went straight to her car.

The population served by Chicago’s Uptown station is, in its diversity, practically an encyclopedia of contemporary American city dwellers. Professionals and retirees live in high-rises and large houses near Lake Michigan, transients and drug addicts come and go on Lawrence and Bryn Mawr Avenues, and on either side of the El tracks Asian and Eastern European immigrants share alleys with lifelong middle-class Chicagoans like Doyle. For years, the one thing all these people had in common was the 60640 zip code — that, and the unpleasant experience that was in store for them whenever they had to visit the Uptown station. The lobby smelled like a subway platform. The clerks seemed to have no pleasure in life but breaking for coffee at peak hours and hurling parcels marked “Fragile” at distant hampers. Customers budgeted an hour when they went to claim a package.

When she arrived at the station, Doyle asked to speak to Nichols. She was told that he was not in the building. Skeptical, she dialed the station’s number from the pay phone in the lobby. Nichols answered. What ensued was an archetypical Chicago scene: an angry postal customer confronting an evasive, unhelpful postal manager. Scenes like this ended, at best, with a promise of better service in the future; at worst, with the manager shouting obscenities at the customer.

On this particular afternoon, however, as Doyle and Nichols locked horns on the telephone, a tall, energetic woman strode into the Uptown lobby and asked if she could help. She introduced herself as Gayle Campbell. Doyle explained her problem, and Campbell disappeared into the back of the station. A few minutes later she returned with a week’s worth of Doyle’s mail. She also gave Doyle the numbers of her beeper and her home telephone, and urged her to call her if she had any more trouble with her delivery. Then she disappeared into the back of the station again.

The United States Postal Service, the country’s universal hard-copy delivery system, has a problem with big cities. Last winter, when Doyle met Campbell, eighty-eight percent of the nation’s households found their mail service “good,” “very good,” or “excellent,” but cities like New York and Washington had satisfaction indices in the mid-seventies, and Chicago, with a score of sixty-four percent, ranked dead last. More than a third of Chicagoans rated their service as “poor” or “fair,” and the discontent was even greater in the city’s crowded, affluent north-lakefront districts, where service had been execrable for a decade and consumer frustration had reached an intensity that seemed comic to those who didn’t share it.

A representative Chicago horror story, unusual only in its protraction, is that of Marilyn Katz, a media and political consultant. In 1986, Katz and her husband bought a ninety-year-old house on Magnolia Avenue, a stable, uncrowded neighborhood in the Uptown district. When they had lived there for three years, their mail abruptly stopped coming. Katz called the Uptown station four times, over a period of two weeks, before the station manager provided an explanation. The explanation was that Katz’s mail carrier had declared her house abandoned.

Service then resumed, but only fitfully. Katz’s mail came late, if it came at all, and often it was heavily seasoned with mail for other houses in her neighborhood. She engaged in especially lively trade with the 5500 block of Lakewood. Her homeowner’s insurance was canceled, and so was her health insurance; she had never received the bills. Before leaving on a ten-day vacation in August of 1990, she received notice that her phone service would be terminated for nonpayment. When she returned from vacation, her phone bills from May, June, July, and August were waiting for her. A few months later, she noticed that she had stopped getting The New Yorker. When she called the subscription service, she learned that the Uptown station had sent notification that she had moved away.

In the winter of 1992, Katz hand-delivered copies of a questionnaire on mail service to every household in a sixteen-block area of her neighborhood. The returns brought a litany of complaints similar to her own, plus fresh horrors. “Mailman drinks, erratic, hangs out with peculiar friends during delivery”; “Mailwoman delivers mail with her children and has children deliver the mail”; “Mailman harasses us at night, asks for money.”

Katz sent her survey results to the Chicago postmaster. Six months later, having received no reply, she began to work with her alderman, Mary Ann Smith, whose office had been processing postal complaints since 1988. Smith extracted a promise from Jimmie Mason, the new postmaster, to respond to Katz’s survey by October 2, but it was midwinter before Smith was able to arrange for Katz and her neighbors to meet with him. Mason asked them for their help in monitoring mail service. Katz said that she didn’t want to monitor the mail, she just wanted to get it. Mason said improvement would take time. In the interim, he promised to repaint Uptown’s corner mailboxes, which had been heavily tagged by local youth. He also offered to provide the community with its own blue paint to keep the boxes clean. To Katz, this seemed the ultimate in codependency: “Not only can we do delivery and monitoring for them. We can also paint.”

Although Mary Ann Smith continued to arrange “town meetings,” at which various postal officials made various promises, service in Uptown did not improve. Finally, last winter, after six years of steady agitation, Smith concluded that no force she could muster locally would compel the United States Postal Service to listen. She urged the City Council’s Committee on Finance to hold hearings on the economic impact of poor postal service, and then she gave up. “We’d done our part,” she says. “I’m not really supposed to spend my time on this.”

Katz, meanwhile, had turned over her important outgoing mail to Federal Express and had arranged for direct deposit of her checks. She made sure that all valuable documents were sent to her office downtown. Just as she avoided other universal public services by driving a car to work and sending her children to private school, she now bypassed the Postal Service, as much as possible, with her telephone, fax machine, and computer. She, too, had given up. “There was no accountability,” she says. “It was clear that the post office didn’t care.”

For Marilyn Katz and Mary Ann Smith and Debra Doyle — and for others as well, like U.S. Representative Sidney R. Yates of the Ninth District of Illinois, who had been criticizing Chicago postal operations for a decade — the most frustrating part of dealing with the post office was that nobody connected with it could explain why the mail was not being delivered. Katz occasionally heard excuses (for instance, the Uptown manager confided to her that postal workers’ unions prevented him from disciplining his carriers), but she never received even a token explanation of the failures that her survey had uncovered. Officials were cordial at town meetings and silent afterward. It was as if they not only didn’t care; they didn’t even know they had a problem.

When Doyle met Gayle Campbell in the Uptown lobby, she found an administrator who plainly did care. Later in the evening, when she spoke to Campbell at home, she realized she had also found an administrator who knew the post office had a problem. Campbell was voluble and angry, and Doyle quickly recognized — so quickly that she called her alderman, Patrick O’Connor, the very next morning — that frustration inside the post office had finally reached the level of frustration on the outside. With this equalization, information began to flow.

THE POSTAL SERVICE, though forever maligned, is the most constant and best-loved presence of federal government in the nation’s daily life. My sense of being an American devolves in some small part from knowing that we still have the best mail service and lowest postage rates and ugliest stamps of any industrialized nation. (How Italian the Italian post office is; how German the German.) For a bureaucracy, moreover, the Postal Service performs a difficult task creditably. I suspect that postal horrors would fade to insignificance if every household in the country had to deal with the Department of Labor or the Navy six times a week. Although the Postmaster General, Marvin Runyon, is fond of calling his fifty-billion-dollar-a-year operation the eighth-largest corporation in the country, he labors under constraints that no private-sector CEO has to deal with: responsibilities to congressional committees; maintenance of genuine diversity in hiring and promotion, with special attention to veterans and the handicapped; and, above all, the provision of universal flat-rate first-class service. The Postal Service embodies the dream of democracy. Any citizen, even a convict or a child, can communicate with any other for the same low price. This abiding ideal of universal service is what preserves an institution that for most of its existence has dwelled at the dangerous intersection of big government, big business, and local politics. Were it not for this ideal, Washington would have long ago sold off the whole operation.

The strain in the relations between Chicago and its post office is, to some extent, a consequence of universal service. I’ve noticed that whenever I talk to postal workers I feel uncomfortably transparent, epistemically disadvantaged. The workers don’t have to know the particulars of my personal involvement with mail, like the fact that I religiously make carbon copies of my personal letters, or that I’ve changed my address sixteen times in the last five years (in the last year alone I’ve had four addresses in Philadelphia), or that as a boy I collected all three variations of the famously flawed 1962 Dag Hammarskjöld issue, or that I consider a postage scale the one really indispensable small appliance. What postal workers know about me is what they know about absolutely everybody: I’m a customer.

Like the Catholic clergy, the Postal Service is stranger to us than we are to it. Oprah Winfrey makes a koan of the question: Why do postal workers shoot each other? Despite its ubiquity, the post office remains among the most recondite of American work environments. It’s a foreign country within the country. It has its own interactive satellite television network, via which workers receive news and exhortations from L’Enfant Plaza in Washington.

Many workers keep their postal lives strictly separate from their private lives. Chicago clerks and carriers who live in rough neighborhoods tell me they don’t reveal their occupation to their neighbors, because working for the post office marks you as a person of means, a target for muggers. A high-level administrator tells me he’s learned to say that he works for “the government,” because otherwise people ask him why they didn’t get their mail last Wednesday.

When postal workers hang out together, they talk about who slept with whom for a promotion, and which handler was found dead of natural causes on a sofa in the employee lounge. They speculate about the reason that Marvin Runyon’s eyes weren’t blinking during a television interview, about whether it was due to medication for his back pain. They revel in dog lore. I’m advised that if I’m ever set upon by a pack of strays I should Mace the one that barks first. I’m told the story of a suburban carrier who was forced to take refuge from an enraged German shepherd in a storage mailbox that he’d been throwing his banana peels and milk cartons into all summer.

On a hot June morning, I stand in the comfortably shabby work area of the Cragin station, on Chicago’s West Side, while a carrier named Larry Johnson finishes tossing mail into his “case”—a console of pigeonholes with a slot for every pair of addresses on his route. Sorting a day’s mail takes a carrier anywhere from an hour and a half to four hours; the workday starts as early as 5:30. “It doesn’t take a hell of a lot of brains to do this job,” Johnson tells me, “other than the fact that you’ve got to know how to read.” He adds, with a laugh, that in the post office you can’t always take literacy for granted. Johnson is a burly man whose blue postal slacks ride low on his hips; he’s thirty-five, but his physical weariness makes him seem older. He gives me a canister of Mace (his own canister sees action two or three times a week), and I follow him outside to his car, a scarred burgundy Lincoln sedan, whose trunk he has to prop open with a tire iron while he fills it with bundles of mail and one shoebox-size parcel. In Chicago, not all carriers are provided with mail trucks.

Johnson spends more of his workday in the station than on the street, but the street is where he finds whatever meaning his job has to offer. As he loads his mailbag for the first leg of the route, he tells me that he doesn’t socialize with his coworkers. “They talk too much,” he says. “They tell each other their business.” Like the majority of mailmen, Johnson moonlights; he’s the minister of a Protestant church. Johnson’s congregation doesn’t know he carries mail, and his fellow carriers don’t know he preaches. On the street, however, the old women waiting at their gates to exchange “good morning”s with him know exactly who he is. They give him letters to mail, money to buy them stamps, and news of the neighborhood. He points out to me a house whose owner died the previous Saturday.

It’s a light mail day in a working-class neighborhood. Johnson has little but hospital bills and Walgreens flyers to feed the slots and boxes. His job is simply legwork and concentration. If he lets his mind wander — lets himself wonder whether the family at the end of the block remembered to lock up their crazy dog this morning — he forgets to deliver magazines or catalogues, which are pigeonholed separately, and he has to backtrack. His shirt darkens with sweat as we walk through the long morning shadows, through the vacancy of a residential neighborhood emptied by the morning rush hour. Children who stay home sick and writers who stay home working know this emptiness. It brings a sense of estrangement from the world, and for me that sense has always been sharpened and confirmed by the sound of a mailman’s footsteps approaching and receding. To be a mailman is to inhabit this emptiness for hours, to disturb five hundred abandoned lawns, one after another. I ask Johnson to tell me the most interesting thing that has happened to him in his nine years of carrying mail. After a moment’s thought, he says that nothing interesting has ever happened to him.

Perhaps the most important fact about postal work is that it’s seen by those who do it as lucrative and secure; a letter carrier with six years’ tenure makes better than thirty thousand dollars and can be fired only if he really messes up. Another important fact is that the work can be scary and unpleasant. The post office functions both as a springboard out of housing-project poverty and as a sanctuary for the downwardly mobile, for loners like Bartleby the Scrivener. (Melville ascribed Bartleby’s emotional damage to employment at the Dead Letter Office.) Managers worry about disgruntled clerks and carriers, since many postal workers are veterans with weapons skills, and almost everybody worries about punitive assignments — to the midnight shift, to a high-crime route, to North Dakota. The organization relies heavily on top-down military-style discipline to enforce productivity, and the flip side of this discipline is deception and resentment. There are carriers who will stop at a gas station to watch a baseball game if they can get away with it. Dope is smoked and whiskey drunk on loading docks. Further up in the bureaucracy, the drugs are legal: managers tell me about their prescriptions for Valium, Klonopin, Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil. I spend an evening drinking double margaritas with three administrators who are profoundly frustrated by incompetent colleagues. They tell me that once you enter the world of postal salaries and benefits it’s hard to leave, even if you hate it.

“Most people say we’re overpaid and do nothing,” one of them says.

“We couldn’t get a job in Chicago,” the second, a woman in her late forties, says. “We being with the Chicago post office? And looking for a job? I guess I could be a waitress somewhere. But they’d watch me very carefully.”

“It’s like testing positive for HIV,” the third tells me.

GAYLE CAMPBELL, THE PERSON who played the central role in the fall of the Chicago post office, is a captive of both the postal world and her own perfectionism. She is a lanky, handsome woman with large eyes, a communicative brow, and thick auburn hair that she wears pinned up or in a pageboy. She has an obvious intelligence, an intensity of gesture and feeling, that can inspire devotion. The customers she has helped all characterize her as a ministering angel. Robert Pope, an interior designer, tells me, “I have not spoken to one straight shooter in the post office, except Gayle Campbell. She’s a rare individual, a shining light.” Other admirers of Campbell, while no less enthusiastic, admit to being unsettled by the extremity of her dedication to the Postal Service. She has turned a processing plant upside down looking for some misdirected airline tickets. She has taken packages home to her apartment, in the Uptown district, and has got out of bed to deliver them to a customer in her lobby. She routinely spends seventy hours a week on the job, while getting paid for forty. There’s little boundary between her work and her identity. She calls herself a “mail freak.” Her husband is a letter carrier.

Although Campbell’s history is exceptional in its details, it fits the model of the career postal worker who, as an outsider in the larger world, finds a mission in service and a home in regimental authority. Campbell was born in Canada in 1950 and grew up in Edmonton and Moose Jaw. Culturally, she still considers herself Canadian, and she describes her ancestry as African, Irish, and Native American. In 1962, her family moved to Harvey, a small town south of Chicago, and Campbell, an excellent student, finished high school there before her sixteenth birthday. She immediately enlisted in the Army and served in Vietnam for two years. When she was home on leave, she took the civil-service exam and scored 99.6 out of a possible 100. Immediately upon her discharge from the Army, she reported to the postmaster in Harvey. “I was a child bride of the Postal Service,” she says. “It’s all I know.”

Campbell worked as a letter carrier for fifteen years. In 1987 she was promoted into mail processing and began to rise rapidly. By 1991 she was a general supervisor of automation and mechanization in Chicago, with two hundred employees and thirteen supervisors working beneath her. Over the next year and a half she was shifted throughout the processing system as a troubleshooter, trainer, and auditor. In the fall of 1992, however, a reorganization of the postal bureaucracy eliminated several intermediate civil-service grades in mail processing; this appeared to preclude her further advancement. She decided to seek a slight demotion and move into delivery; her plan was to get training there, sit in an intermediate-level job for a year, and then try to jump back into processing at a high level. In January 1993 she became a delivery supervisor at the Hyde Park station, on Chicago’s South Side.

That same winter, corporate customers of the Postal Service, including a consortium of regional banks known as the Chicago Clearing House, were lodging bitter complaints about their service. For fear of scaring customers away, the group never publicized the complaints, but they were in a state of acute distress about, among other things, the lockboxes, located in the Central Post Office, in which they received large checks from institutional and corporate investors. The Postal Service was officially committed to delivering ninety percent of lockbox mail in standard time. (For mail sent and delivered within the Chicago area, the standard is one day, i.e., overnight. For mail sent from Seattle, the standard for Chicago delivery is three days.) By the winter of 1993, the percentage of on-time delivery to the lockboxes was in the low sixties.

Facing heat on many fronts, Ormer Rogers, the Postal Service’s Great Lakes Area manager, set up an eight-member Service Improvement Team to identify breakdowns in the processing and distribution system and work aggressively to repair them. Some of Rogers’s appointments were political; others reflected professional accomplishment. The latter group included Gayle Campbell, who became the de facto leader of the team.

There was no end to the trouble she uncovered. She found carriers walking their routes with makeshift plastic tubs strapped to their carts because no one had requisitioned satchels for them. She found carriers putting undelivered mail in corner mailboxes to be collected and reprocessed. She overheard a station supervisor shouting at a customer whose post-office-box lock had been broken, “Get the fuck out of here!” She found carriers who sat in their trucks on cold days from noon to 7:30 p.m. and then returned to the station, with all their mail, to collect four hours of overtime. She went to the airmail facility at O’Hare Airport and found that jets were being allowed to depart without their contractually specified complement of mail. She went to the NBC Tower, downtown, and found that mail was delivered in sacks that were left out where anyone could open them. She dropped test letters randomly in corner mailboxes throughout the city and kept track of when they were picked up and canceled. Some of the letters ended up at a dead-letter office in Minneapolis.

Such findings, and the reports they generated, hardly endeared the Service Improvement Team to Chicago station managers. In October of 1993, Postmaster Jimmie Mason met with the team and urged it to tone down its reports. Instead of putting its criticisms in writing, he said, the team should endeavor to cooperate with the station managers; as outsiders, the team members didn’t understand the pressures that a station manager had to contend with.

To Campbell, this sounded like a plea for business as usual. Her life was so bound up in the post office that she considered it an extension of herself. A “dirty” post office offended her like a dirty bathroom. Instead of toning down her reports, she made them even harsher. On November 15 and 16, during a follow-up visit to the Graceland Annex, a north-lakefront station, she listed the number of linear feet of mail that were “curtailed,” or left behind, when carriers set out on their routes. Case No. 5706 had seventy-seven feet of curtailment. Other troubled cases had eighty-five, a hundred, and ninety-three feet. Under Case No. 5709 the team discovered two large sacks of collected but unprocessed mail with week-old postage meter dates. On November 17, at the Lakeview station, Campbell found mail that had been held for vacations in July still awaiting delivery. At Case No. 1342 she found Priority Mail dating from October and an Internal Revenue Service communication from September. At Case No. 1346 she turned up General Mills cereal samples from June.

Throughout 1993, Campbell had assured irate customers that Jimmie Mason was serious about cleaning up Chicago. Tenaciously optimistic, she still believed she would get a promotion for her long workdays and for the improvements her team had produced. But either she was wrong about Mason from the start or Chicago had changed him. In late November, according to Campbell, he promised a gathering of the city’s station managers that the Service Improvement Team would be gone by year’s end, and that they need not worry about further harassment.

That same week, however, a man named Jerry Stevens went to the Graceland station to inquire about his business mail, which had failed to materialize for four straight days. Venturing briefly into a work area, he saw a mountain of curtailment. Ninety minutes after phoning a postal-complaint line, he got a call from Graceland’s station manager, who apologized for his poor service and then threatened him with arrest if he ever entered the work area again. Stevens immediately called the Chicago Sun-Times, and their reporter Charles Nicodemus made the anecdote the nucleus of a blistering account of North Side postal complaints.

When the story appeared, on December 13, Rogers, the Great Lakes Area manager, ordered his staff to audit the north-lakefront stations, and requested that the Postal Inspection Service carry out a parallel study. The Inspection Service is a watchdog on a long leash: it investigates everything from employee pilferage and drug use to S&L fraud and Internet pornography. Having worked with the inspectors and found them trustworthy, Campbell had quietly begun to send them copies of her reports. Before Jimmie Mason could put the Service Improvement Team out of business, the chief postal inspector asked it to assist him in the audit.

When the new reports were completed, in early February of 1994, Mason met with each team member to discuss what he called their “upward mobility.” Campbell told him she thought she would make a good station manager at Uptown, since it served her own neighborhood. Mason said she didn’t have the proper background. He offered to make her a supervisor under the then Uptown manager, Thomas Nichols — who had been a frequent target of her criticisms. She said no thank you. A week later, Mason reassigned her to Hyde Park as a delivery supervisor.

THE CHICAGO POST OFFICE first became an emblem of an institution in crisis when, in October of 1966, it suffered a nasty seizure. A backlog of ten million pieces of mail overwhelmed the huge, obsolescent Central Post Office. Railroad cars and mail trucks were gridlocked on the building’s approaches. For nearly three weeks, delivery was paralyzed in the city and millions of letters and parcels headed elsewhere were delayed.

Two years later, the President’s Commission on Postal Organization, known as the Kappel Commission, placed the blame for the shutdown on outmoded, poorly maintained facilities and on a variety of management problems, including a vacancy in the office of city postmaster over the previous six months, the “retirement of an unusually large number of experienced supervisors at the end of 1965,” low employee morale, “a sick leave ratio double the national average,” and “the lowest postal productivity record in the nation.” Plus ça change: the list is practically a point-by-point diagnosis of the Chicago postal crisis of 1994.

The Central Post Office at 433 West Van Buren Street, now sixty-one years old, is still the largest freestanding postal facility in the country, and is a monument to all the ways in which vital information is no longer transmitted. The green waters of the Chicago River lap against its underpinnings. Its subbasements give onto the platforms of Union Station, to which trains have all but ceased to carry mail, and the eight-lane Eisenhower Expressway punches straight through its flanks. In the quiet, cavernous lobby, brass bas-relief medallions depict five transport options that the post office had availed itself of by 1933: sailing ship, steamship, airplane, stagecoach, and railroad. A freestanding Philatelic Center sells hummingbirds and self-adhesive squirrels and, in every shape and color, love, LOVE, Love—the cheery abstraction that American postage commemorates like royalty.

The functions of the Central Post Office will soon be divided between a new plant being built across the street, at a cost of a quarter billion dollars, and a smaller plant in the northwest corner of the city, which is beginning to come on line. For now, the old plant still processes most of the Second City’s mail. At six in the evening, workers of both sexes toil in the eternal diesely gloom of subterranean loading docks, taking plastic tubs of mail from collection trucks and sending them upstairs to the “waterfall”—a system of belts and chutes up which incoming letters must struggle like spawning salmon. A carpeted roller shunts everything unfit for automated processing (bent things, thick things, ragged things) into a hamper for special treatment. Automation and mechanization have vastly speeded mail processing since 1966, but over the same period the overall volume of mail has more than doubled. Four-foot shrink-wrapped blocks of TV Guide, brute cubes of commercial matter, sit idly on pallets. Supervisors wear buttons that say, “I am part of the solution.” There’s a backwater dustiness to the place. Sooty windows spread evening sunshine onto battered parquet floors and government-issue gray furniture. Clerks moving neither swiftly nor slowly carry trays from egress points to ingress points. The plant, in its antiquity, is appallingly vertical. The upper-floor loading ramps were designed to accommodate dray horses.

My official guide through the Chicago postal system is a sunny, petite, softspoken communications specialist named Debra Hawkins. Everywhere we go inside the Central Post Office, she meets former coworkers plangent with delight at seeing her, and Hawkins is eloquent on the theme of “the postal family.” She speaks of postal bowling teams, postal golf teams, postal basketball teams. “The atmosphere is very close-knit,” she says. “We have individuals here with fifty-plus years of service. This is their real family. They live to come to work at the post office.”

If the family works so well together, then why are Chicago’s customer satisfaction ratings consistently so low? Of the various explanations that Hawkins and other family members offer me, an impressive number implicate the public, (1) Customers don’t understand that not everyone can be the first stop on a carrier’s route. (2) Customers remember the one bad experience they ever had and forget the frequent good experiences. (3) Customers move a lot, and they misuse or fail to fill out Change of Address cards. (4) Customers don’t believe in apartment numbers, and often they change apartments within the same building without correcting their address. (5) Customers refuse to put their names on their mailboxes. (6) Immigrants address their mail in a foreign style. (7) With gentrification, the population on the North Side has grown more rapidly than stations can be expanded. (8) More and more people are starting home-based businesses, which add to the postal burden. (9) Customers address mail in a scrawl that automated sorters can’t decipher. (10) Press coverage accentuates the negative. And anyway (11) service is just as bad in many other big cities.

On the one hand, these explanations reflect the kind of denial, both literal and psychological, that has allowed service in Chicago to remain terrible despite the constant drumming of informed complaint. All manner of codependencies can flourish in the bosom of a family under stress. Rather than admit that someone in the family is doing a very bad job, some employees of the post office will argue (Explanation No. 12) that “the people who get the most mail”—in other words, the Postal Service’s most valuable customers—“complain the most.”

On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit — where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed — I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.

Not all of the postal family’s explanations of Chicago’s woes implicate the public. There’s a great deal of talk about the harsh winter of 1994 (Explanation No. 13). There’s also talk about management. Debra Hawkins notes that Chicago has had seven postmasters in the last seven years, each with a different plan, and that postal executives transferred from warmer, more suburban parts of the country often lack the heart to deal with the system’s problems and take early retirement instead. Chicago real estate is a particular headache: modernization of the city’s processing facilities was delayed for years when the post office set its heart on a piece of land for which the city planning commission had other ideas.

Finally, and most plausibly, the postal family blames Marvin Runyon’s reorganization of the Postal Service. A longtime auto-company executive and a former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Runyon became Postmaster General in July 1992, and immediately launched an attack on the postal bureaucracy. He announced his intention to eliminate thirty thousand “overhead” personnel, and he offered a bonus of six months’ pay to any eligible employee who took retirement by October 3, 1992. The buyout offer — part of the most radical reorganization of a federal agency since Eisenhower overhauled the Pentagon — proved immensely popular. By the time all the forms were in, forty-eight thousand postal employees had taken the early out. The trouble was that only fourteen thousand of them occupied “overhead” positions. The rest were senior carriers, clerks, mail handlers, and postmasters.

The buyout hit Chicago particularly hard. A system as antiquated as Chicago’s runs on expertise, and in late 1992 it lost fifteen hundred of its most senior employees, or nearly ten percent of its workforce. Former processing and administrative personnel were sent to work in stations with few skilled people available to train them. Throughout 1993, there simply weren’t enough bodies to do the job. Because management could not afford to suspend anyone, it instituted a program of “paper suspensions,” under which workers could receive as many as three suspensions for misconduct and still not miss a day of pay.

All this had a predictable effect on discipline. More subtle was the damage to morale. Without good supervision, the only reward for letter carriers who work hard and complete their routes by early afternoon — and such carriers, it should be stressed, form the majority at most stations — is to be given the leftover work of lazy coworkers. The reward for bad carriers, however, the ones who drink away the afternoon and finish their routes at nightfall, is overtime pay. Poor supervision produces a system of inverted incentives, a system that executives in Washington like to call “the Culture.” Those postal workers who are under the sway of the Culture do as little work as they can get away with, except on alternate Thursdays. Two Thursdays a month, carriers can pick up their paychecks as soon as they complete their route, and the entire city of Chicago has its mail by early afternoon.

Erich Walch, a lifelong Chicagoan who works in Evanston, is one of the many carriers for whom service is its own reward. Walch believes that Postal Service management fails to appreciate the intelligence and hard work of dedicated carriers. He says that’s why the frustration level among them is so high. “A lot of people get to the point where they say, ‘I have done everything I can, so I’m going to do less. I will take out only first-and second-class mail. I will take out maybe an extra one or two bulk-rate letters. And I’ll walk real slow. And there’s always tomorrow.’”

Station managers, for their part, complain that cumbersome labor agreements and obstructionist unions prevent them from enforcing discipline. This view is contested by union officials, including Walch (he’s an assistant steward), who insist that managers are simply too lazy or uninformed or snowed under with paperwork to follow the rules. Indeed, the supposed adversarial relationship between supervisors and unions has the aspect of a convenient myth. The unions provide managers with an excuse for their failure to manage, which, in turn, enhances union power at a station; productivity falls through the cracks.

The Culture pervades the bureaucracy as well. Administrators in Chicago, an amazingly demoralized lot, still lament the incompetence of the managers who came to power under the 1992 reorganization. Most Postal Service employees believe career advancement to be tainted by favoritism; and although nepotism is seldom flagrant, the Chicago post office is quite literally a family, an extended family of aunts, uncles, brothers-in-law, and girlfriends. One upper-level administrator tells me, “The people who’ve been promoted above us, we’ve been asked by management to train.”

This particular administrator, in despair over her boss’s stupidity, recently bought a straw voodoo doll from a vendor in the Haitian community in Rogers Park. She paid ten dollars extra to have the doll cursed in her boss’s name. The doll came with three pearl-headed hatpins, with which she pierced its head, heart, and stomach. The following morning, her office was abuzz with the news that her boss was being transferred out of Chicago. Not long after the transfer, he was struck by a serious illness of an undisclosed nature.

EARLY IN THE MORNING of February 4, 1994, in the parking lot of the Lakeview station on Irving Park Road, the postal family’s dysfunction bore spectacular fruit. A letter carrier who couldn’t start his truck opened the truck of a coworker, Carrier 1345, for a jump start. In the rear cargo area he found a hundred sacks of undelivered mail — what turned out to be 40,100 pieces in all, with 484 different addresses. The oldest envelopes bore postmarks from December.

Word of the discovery reached Gayle Campbell when the postal inspectors asked the Service Improvement Team to count the contents of the hundred sacks. (They did it mechanically, with optical character readers.) She was bitterly unsurprised by Carrier 1345’s malfeasance. In a November report she had cited him as an ineffective worker who habitually curtailed his mail, and it was obvious that nothing had been done in the meantime to improve his performance. Now she decided to pass the information to a person who might actually use it.

The person she chose was Charles Nicodemus. Since his December Sun-Times article appeared, Chicagoans had been bombarding the newspaper’s offices with postal anecdotes, but the newspaper didn’t have enough hard news to pursue a follow-up. Then, on January 21, Nicodemus got a call from Alderman Patrick O’Connor. O’Connor said that one of his constituents — Debra Doyle — had been speaking to a postal worker who was willing to tell stories and name names. Nicodemus leaped at the chance to cultivate Gayle Campbell.

When Nicodemus tried to confirm the story of Carrier 1345, the post office lied to him repeatedly. Even after the Sun-Times ran the first of three stories on the incident, postal spokesmen continued to deny, for nearly a full day, that the sacks of mail had been discovered accidentally. These lies, along with the news that Chicago’s postal-customer-satisfaction index had dropped to an all-time low of sixty-four percent, led the Sun-Times, on February 20, to run an editorial calling for the removal of Jimmie Mason.

By the time the editorial appeared, Campbell had returned to Hyde Park. But even as she began to work with Nicodemus, she’d kept hoping that Ormer Rogers, the regional manager, would be as appalled as she was by his staffs reports. Her final disillusionment occurred at the Ashbum station, in southwest Chicago, where she attended an all-city delivery-management meeting in late February. The main floor of the station was a chin-high sea of mail. “I opened the door and I said, ‘God, this is not a post office, it’s a warehouse,’” she says. On their way to the second floor, Ormer Rogers and fifty station managers and more than two hundred supervisors waded through the mail without remark, as if it didn’t exist. “I knew then that I was working for the wrong ones,” Campbell says. “I knew then that they were not serious about improving anything.” Despairing, she gave Nicodemus the final reports on the audits that Rogers had commissioned in December. The reports produced a Sun-Times cover on March 2 (“POSTAL PROBES FIND A MESS”) and a string of rich follow-ups: eight hundred linear feet of mail going nowhere at the Lincoln Park station; supervisors tolerating drug and alcohol use by workers during working hours; the Service Improvement Team silenced and disbanded.

Campbell also faxed copies of the team’s final report to the Washington office of Senator Paul Simon, who had heard about her from Patrick O’Connor. Simon and his fellow Illinois senator, Carol Moseley-Braun, sent a joint letter to Marvin Runyon urging him to visit Chicago personally. Runyon, afraid of walking into a hornet’s nest, refused. Simon then called him at his home in Nashville (Runyon commutes by jet to Washington) and persuaded him to reconsider. Runyon dispatched his second-in-command, chief operating officer Joseph R. Caraveo, along with two other national vice-presidents, to prepare the way for his own visit.

On the Friday before Runyon’s visit, in one of those “accidents” that fuel paranoid conspiracy theories, twenty thousand pieces of mail bearing dates between 1979 and 1992 turned up in garbage cans behind a house in southwest Chicago; the retired carrier who had owned the house confessed that because he was unable to finish his route on time he had habitually taken his work home with him. On that same Friday, the police found a two-hundred-pound pile of fresh mail burning in a walkway beneath a rail viaduct. The guilty carrier, Darnesia Bullock, later explained that, with Caraveo conducting random inspections throughout the city, carriers had been under intense pressure not to leave mail behind in stations. The walkway had presented itself to her as a logical repository. Bullock conjectured that homeless people had set fire to the mail.

The city was in a fractious mood when Runyon arrived. His visit culminated in a “town meeting” at the Broadway Armory, in the Uptown district. Officially the meeting was a City Council Finance Committee hearing on the economic impact of poor mail service. Runyon, Mason, and the Chicago mail-processing director, Celestine Green, sat at a table with the air of defendants at a war-crimes tribunal, facing an ocean of accusers and a sprinkling of defenders. While members of the Progressive Labor Party passed out flyers demanding eight hours’ pay for six hours’ work, Runyon offered his apologies to Chicago and promised to send in a task force to clean things up. Witnesses at the open mikes told caustic jokes and sang derisive songs. Marilyn Katz articulated her frustration, and Debra Doyle related a soundbitesized story of missing gas bills — one that was rebroadcast on TV for months afterward.

After Runyon left Chicago, a twenty-seven-member task force of skilled managers from around the country arrived to continue the work of the unthanked and largely unpromoted Service Improvement Team. Familiar promises were made as if for the first time, and media attention waned temporarily. But Jimmie Mason’s days as postmaster were numbered.

On April 25, Van H. Seagraves, the publisher of the Business Mailers Review, broke the story that Celestine Green had spent two hundred thousand dollars of maintenance funds to refurbish her office suite with hardwood kitchen cabinets, a marble bathroom, and an air conditioner for each of the suite’s seven windows. Rumor had it that word of the renovation quite literally leaked out when water from Green’s whirlpool bath came through the ceiling of the express-mail unit, two floors down. What made things worse was that by the end of 1995 the entire Central Post Office was to be vacated. Green’s misjudgment was so egregious that postal management in Washington had no choice but to remove her. While they were at it, on May 3 they removed Ormer Rogers and Jimmie Mason. This being the Postal Service; it was all done gently. Although Rogers received a demotion, none of the executives took a cut in pay or benefits. Rogers was sent to Kansas City, Mason to South Carolina, and Green to the southern suburbs of Chicago, where her husband manages the processing plant.

With Runyon’s task force at work in Chicago and the top managers gone, the cloud of fallout drifted east toward Washington. At congressional hearings held in early June, members of the board of postal governors — the presidentially appointed overseers of the Postal Service — expressed contrition and anger. Marvin Runyon announced yet another reorganization of the postal hierarchy, reuniting Delivery with Processing, divisions that he’d divorced in 1992. The reorganization drew fire from U.S. Representative William L. Clay, who noted that only one of ten new regional vice-presidents was black, and it apparently exhausted the patience of one postal governor, Robert Setrakian, who privately called on his fellow governors to remove Runyon before the Postal Service fell apart altogether. The sense of crisis deepened in July, when the Washington Post reported that postal inspectors had found millions of pieces of mail in four trailers at a processing plant in suburban Maryland, which was unable or unwilling to do its daily job.

In each of these events, the fall of the Chicago post office resonated. When Debra Doyle met Gayle Campbell, the boundary between two worlds had been breached. Doyle brought Campbell to Nicodemus, who in turn opened the postal world to the Chicago public; with the arrival of Marvin Runyon from Washington and Eye to Eye with Connie Chung from New York, it became inevitable that heads would roll.

A coda to the fall was provided on Saturday, May 7, when firefighters responding to an electrical fire in a condominium in Palatine Township, a northwestern suburb of Chicago, found their access to the attic blocked by a wall of letters and parcels in the master-bedroom closet. A stray bundle of mail fell on a fireman’s foot; it bore addresses on the North Side of Chicago. The haul consisted of 3,396 pieces of first-class mail (including one Visa card taken from its envelope but never signed or used), 1,138 pieces of second-class mail, 364 pounds of bulk business mail, and 1,136 compact discs. The condominium belonged to Robert K. Beverly, a seven-year postal veteran letter carrier attached to Chicago’s Irving Park station, who began taking mail home with him in his used Jaguar for fear of being disciplined for not completing his route. What’s mystifying about this story is that no one on his route is known to have complained about missing mail. His arrest took the Irving Park station completely by surprise.

The postal family tells me that the incident was an anomaly. It calls Beverly a bad apple or a sicko, his actions an indication of nothing but the darkness in his own heart. The family says the clustering of bad apples in Chicago this spring was adventitious. Publicity from one discovery led to others. Many of the misdeeds that came to light were unfresh. Things are no different in any other city.

When I recite these excuses to Gayle Campbell, she shakes her head grimly, like the hanging judge she is. She says that in a Service Improvement Team report in 1993 she flagged Beverly’s route as “a troubled case,” littered with old mail. She believes that there are other, undiscovered Robert Beverlys in Chicago. Having interviewed Beverly’s foreman (“the most lackadaisical, unconcerned gentleman I’ve ever met”) and the Irving Park station manager, she is able to explain the mysterious lack of complaints. “There were complaints,” she says. “But I know they didn’t keep a complaint log, because I gigged them for that. They didn’t have one complaint log for me. I addressed that issue. They had their feet up on the desk and they were talking about the ballgame. There were twenty people outside waiting to be serviced and two clerks at the window.”

THAT SYSTEMIC FAILURES could persist for ten years in the primary communication network for one of the country’s largest cities and financial centers, and that it took the combined impact of a maverick administrator, media attention, and a congressional delegation to force the system to address those failures, raises serious questions about the long-term viability of both the United States Postal Service and United States cities.

Five years after the Chicago crisis of 1966, the old Post Office Department was reorganized as the United States Postal Service, a federally owned “corporation” over which Congress and the President had oversight but no direct control. The Kappel Commission had concluded that only by operating as a self-supporting business could the Post Office become flexible enough to survive in the modern world. Congress and the President lost the power of political patronage at the post office, but they also shed the burden of running it and covering its deficits. Instead of taking the heat when the public complained about rates or service, they could join in the criticism.

The Chicago postal crisis of 1994 shows the results of this policy. The inhabitants of large cities are now, more than ever, second-class citizens. It’s poignant to see an old Congressman like Sidney Yates, who worked in Washington with Truman, shake his head with nostalgia for the days of patronage. The Postmaster Generalship used to be the plum awarded to the national chairman of the President’s party, and until 1971 all big-city postmasters were political appointees. If your mail service was bad, you could phone your ward boss and get action. By the early nineties, as Yates discovered, you could phone the Postmaster General himself and get nothing. With fifteen thousand employees, the Chicago post office was still a political power base, handing out applications for jobs the way precinct captains once handed out pounds of bacon; but it served no master except itself. The same reorganization that protected postmasters from political harassment, and allowed craft employees to aspire to high postal office, now effectively isolated a city post office from its constituents.

In Chicago, machine politics has given way to racial politics. It escapes public comment but not private observation that unrest among white North Side postal customers began not long after Chicago got its first black postmaster, and that black postmasters have presided over increasingly strident complaints ever since. Earlier in the century, postal work was one of the few respectable careers open to educated African-Americans (Cross Damon, the main character in Richard Wright’s The Outsider, has Sartrean dialogues with three coworkers from 433 West Van Buren Street), and it remains a primary way out for poor inner-city blacks. By the late seventies, when much of the white middle class had withdrawn to the suburbs, the Chicago post office was predominantly black. The figure today is nearly ninety percent.

Many of the problems at a station like Uptown — rampant absenteeism, rapid turnover of employees, poor morale — are aggravated by its distance from the black South Side neighborhoods where most postal workers live. Workers with tenure quickly transfer to more convenient neighborhoods. The same is true of supervisors and managers, who have been known to refer to Uptown as Siberia. The result is a perpetually inexperienced North Side workforce.

Race shaped the crisis in more fundamental ways as well. The north-lakefront stations were perceived as “troubled” because the volume of complaints was so high. In fact, other stations in Chicago were equally badly managed, but residents in poor neighborhoods either worked all day or received little in the mail besides welfare or Social Security checks. On the North Side, there were self-employed people and people of leisure who noticed when the mail came late and when they missed a week of Wall Street Journals. The North Side had expectations. It had learned, in the decades of the Daley machine, how to organize and how to complain. But now the rules had changed. The post office, though it looked like a city service and had once behaved like a city service, was not accountable.

In May, after the transfer of Mason, Rogers, and Green — all of them African-American — the Chicago chapter of the NAACP, noting that two of the three replacements were white and that Thomas Ranft, Green’s white boss, had survived the shakeup, denounced the moves as racist. The denunciation was specious in its implication that the thousands of dedicated black postal workers in Chicago owed their jobs to skin color rather than to competence. But it illuminated, behind the post office’s long reluctance to admit its shortcomings, the fear of losing black control. Gayle Campbell says that what made her a “traitor” was less her public betrayal of the postal family than the fact that she had, in the words of one manager, “brought the white man in.” The white men she brought in were not only William Good and David Fields, who replaced Rogers and Green, and white politicians like Simon and Smith and Yates, but the white media establishment, which many American blacks and almost all Chicago postal workers believe to be biased against them.

In his first months in office, Rufus F. Porter, the new postmaster, has eschewed the rhetoric of family, preferring the corporate vocabulary of “initiative” and “communication” and “the entrepreneurial spirit.” Porter, forty-six, is a native Californian, a onetime mail handler who earned a master’s degree at night school. Visiting him on the fourth floor of the Central Post Office, I see why Celestine Green, whose bureaucratic rank was equivalent to Jimmie Mason’s, had felt the need to redecorate. The Chicago postmaster’s office is a sprawling plain of deep-pile carpeting with scattered settlements of heavy, carved furniture. Porter, a stocky man with strikingly erect posture, sits on the edge of a chair with his hands folded on an enormous boardroom table. He answers my questions in the clipped, forceful cadences of a cadet being drilled. “You can’t teach initiative,” he says. “But what you can do is create an atmosphere, an environment, where people can feel empowered. And that’s what we’re attempting to do. We’re trying to create that atmosphere.”

By most accounts, Porter is succeeding. He has removed precisely the faulty managers whom Campbell targeted in her reports, reinstituted disciplinary suspensions, and shown a willingness to spend whatever it takes to improve service in Chicago. Postal executives frustrated by their superiors may stick pins in straw dolls; but the transfer of a nonperforming administrator probably owes less to the power of voodoo than to Porter’s determination as a reformer. Even the uncompromising Campbell is a convert. “He’s the one that Chicago’s been waiting for,” she says. “We won’t be the last for long.”

SIMPLY NOT TO BE THE WORST anymore: it’s an aspiration whose modesty must temper the optimism that Porter’s efforts inspire. When I ask Frank Brennan, a national Postal Service spokesman, why cities like Chicago have been neglected for so long, he speaks of his organization’s historical association with “small-town America,” where a community’s identity and connection to the republic were wrapped up in its little post office. Big cities, Brennan says, are part of an “evolving America,” where the daily personal connections that define the postal mission are far less workable. Viewed in this way, the neglect of the Chicago post office shows itself to be part of a larger pattern of federal frustration with cities. William Henderson, the Postal Service’s new chief operating officer, says, “There’s no subject in a major American city that’s not difficult to tackle, and the post office is one of them.” Henderson believes that high population densities, in the form of traffic jams and high-rises, inevitably impede the flow of surface mail. “It’s just a fact we face. Everybody is annoyed with cities, and we’re annoyed, too.”

The urban impediments aren’t only logistical. In the early eighties, when a long-repressed urban minority gained control of the post office, many of its members were understandably less interested in attacking the deep structural problems they had inherited than in acquiring (like Celestine Green) the trappings of power long enjoyed by the old ruling faction. At the root of the troubles of the Chicago post office is the gap between the two tiers of American society, which is nowhere more visible than in big cities and which is bridged, nowadays, by little but the universal Postal Service. Maximal wealth and cutting-edge technology exist side by side with a second-and third-generation urban underclass for which employment at the post office may seem less a responsibility than an extension of its federally funded entitlements. Angry as Campbell was at postal management’s betrayal of the public, she was no less angry at the betrayal of the city’s entry-level workers. “They want instruction,” she says. “They want guidance. But if you’ve got somebody who’s back there in the office sucking on a cup of coffee and talking on the phone to Janie in the next station, you’re not going to get that production.”

However much big cities vex the Postal Service, they still generate the high volume of mail that pays for universal service. If they are structurally doomed to slower service, as Henderson suggests, then something has to suffer — either the cities or the Postal Service. And it’s clear that the cities are suffering already. By subtracting from the quality of life and adding to the cost of doing business, poor mail service helps drive corporations and affluent individuals to the suburbs. It’s a process that dismays committed city dwellers, like Marilyn Katz. “To me,” Katz says, “cities are the lifeblood of culture, the lifeblood of democracy, because they’re one of the few places where you have a real integration of different kinds of people. One of the things that’s happened, as society has become more stratified, is that in almost every realm of public service cities have become second-class citizens. The Postal Service works in Wilmette. It doesn’t work in Chicago.”

The Postal Service, for its part, is not harmed by the flight to Wilmette. What does pose a threat is virtual flight, the flight to alternative information-delivery systems. Business-to-business correspondence, which the Postal Service estimates has diminished by a third in the last five years, is where the impact of faxes and e-mail is most visible. So far, this loss has been offset by a robust flow of first-and third-class advertising mail. And boosters of the Postal Service, like William Henderson, sound confident that its usefulness will survive the development of the national information superstructure that Vice-President Gore so warmly heralds. “Mail is the most interactive product in the United States today,” Henderson says. “You can put a letter in your pocket, read it anywhere. It’s the ultimate in interactivity.”

The problem is that the Postal Service need not lose much business to run into serious trouble. In his first appearance before Congress, in 1992, Marvin Runyon described how rising postal rates had already driven third-class advertisers to alternative forms of delivery, like television, or flyers hung from doorknobs. “As we increase our rates,” Runyon said, “the Postal Service will be privatized by outside sources. Not by us but by outside sources.”

Because of its commitment to universal service, the Postal Service has large fixed infrastructure costs. It can’t shrink and grow like most ordinary companies. For this reason, the Internet won’t have to render it obsolete in order to throw it into crisis. The information superhighway need merely exist as an increasingly attractive alternative. If enough mailers, private and corporate, begin to use it, an economic thunderstorm of upward-spiraling rates and downward-spiraling service and mail volume will ensue. When this happens, Congress will have two choices: either subsidize or privatize. Returning to federal subsidy of postal rates would require an honest admission that universal flat-rate service is an expensive ideal; it would cost taxpayers money. The possibility exists, therefore, that the Postal Service will be privatized, with lucrative markets like Wilmette and the Chicago Loop being sold off to the highest bidder, and the post office remaining as an underfunded rump, a carrier of last resort, serving the rural and urban poor.

AT 2:30 ON A HUMID summer afternoon, I drive west from the Loop on a superhighway. While staying in the city I haven’t spent more than twenty-five minutes traveling to an appointment, on the El or on foot. On the national transportation infrastructure, by maneuvering aggressively, I reach the city limits in just under an hour. Traffic in the suburbs is no better. Cars stretch bumper to bumper into the western distance on roads that are being widened, or widened further, even as we drive on them. Only at my destination, a new mail-processing plant in Carol Stream, have the industrial parks and condos paused in their advance across the cornfields.

The Postal Service’s hopes of survival are pinned on growth. To avoid an upward rate spiral, losses in the volume of personal communication must be offset by gains in business-to-household mailings. Already, in the United States one in five advertising dollars is spent on direct mailing, and William Henderson believes that the figure will increase as companies realize the potential of sending out advertisements in envelopes that contain bills or that masquerade as bills. He’s particularly excited about the recent proliferation of credit cards.

To keep pace with rising volumes, the Postal Service of the future will also have to be further automated, and at Carol Stream full automation is close to being a reality. The plant is a technological showcase, with conveyor belts and hoppers and pathways all painted in gum-ball colors, and a control room on whose friendly CRT screens you need only touch an interesting or troubled node with your finger and it interacts with you. There are machines that shuffle and reshuffle envelopes into the order in which a carrier delivers them. There’s a machine that sprays a phosphorescent bar code on the back of each hand-addressed letter and transmits a video image of the address to Knoxville, Tennessee, where workers read and key in the zip code, which is then beamed back to Carol Stream and applied to the front of the envelope in the form of a black bar code. There’s a din from facer-cancelers, from optical character readers, from letter-sorting machines, from passing motorized mule trains, from hook belts and flat-sorters and delivery bar-code sorters; but it’s a level din, a supportive din. The only product of this plant is order. The fluid to which order is brought is predominantly white. It conforms agreeably to friction belts and robotic claspers. It floats, it whispers. It’s called the mail stream, and, unlike the mail at Chicago’s Central Post Office, it has no discernible personality. I’m absurdly pleased when I discover, in a small-parcel sack labeled “Nixie,” a solitary padded mailer, somewhat torn, that is addressed to a pouch number in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and bears a return address of Uncertain, Texas.

Leaving Carol Stream, I drive past soybean fields and a plant that bottles Zima. At the end of a strip mall thirty-seven hundred feet long and one store thick, I happen on K’s Mail Center, a bright, clean outfit that offers not only mailboxes and United States stamps but also a notary service, plain-paper faxing, desktop publishing, key duplication, wrapping paper, and humorous greeting cards. The proprietor, a personable Nigerian immigrant named Chris Kator, keeps long business hours and provides every imaginable shipping service. Kator tells me he acquired his franchise because of the synergy among the services he offers, the opportunities for growth. He says he has no complaints with the Postal Service, although few of his customers choose it for sending packages.

In the air-conditioned cool of Kator’s store, amid unhumming beige equipment in its Powr-Savr mode, the march toward privatization — toward a fragmented republic of terrific bargains and unconscionable gougings — seems to me irresistible. So does the idea that the place to which Americans should go to participate directly in the system that governs them is not a small-town post office with Old Glory in its lobby but an exurban retail outlet with Day-Glo banners (WE SELL BEEPERS) in its plate-glass window.

Back in the city, however, after another unpleasant superhighway experience, I succumb to nostalgia. I think of the delight with which Mary Ann Smith describes the Christmas card, “with a gold-foil envelope and a gold-stamped return address,” that a former alderman sent her from prison. I think of my own delight when I discover that before Debra Hawkins became a communications specialist she was a clerk in the Central Post Office who sorted mail for the neighborhood of Pilsen, and so may have personally handled the letters I sent to my brother in his apartment there. I think of the Evanston carrier, Erich Walch, who says that the customers on his new route all hated their ex-mailman and therefore hated him. “It took over a year for some of these people to look at me as a human being, to not grunt when I said good morning to them, but I’ve changed their perceptions,” he says. I think of the old Polish-American women who stand on their porches and break into smiles as they take envelopes from the hand of the African-American carrier who is also, in his other life, a minister. I think of the mail piling up for me at home in Philadelphia, and I feel a keen anticipation.

What makes the sight of a person in postal uniform a welcome one is not simply the possibility that he is bringing us a billet-doux or a sweepstakes check. It’s the hope and faith that the Postal Service serves us. Ever since it came by stage rider to remote Appalachian settlements, the U.S. Mail has offered to a lonely people a universal laying on of human hands. It’s as sacred as anything gets in this country. The burning of mail in a viaduct deals the same blow to our innocence as the pederasty of priests; and as soon as a sacrament is administered virtually, in the manner of televised evangelism, it reduces worshippers to consumers. Of all the Chicagoans I’ve spoken with, not even the most despairing has suggested that the Postal Service be dismantled.

On August 1, Rufus Porter granted Gayle Campbell’s long-standing request to be transferred from the Hyde Park station. She is now coordinator of the External First-Class Measurement Team. When Campbell told her doctor what her new job entailed — monitoring the pick-up and delivery of first-class mail without being able to affect what she monitors — he said, “They’re trying to kill you.” She recently paid $278 of her own money to a Kelly girl who entered measurement data for a day, and when even this didn’t satisfy her she got up at two in the morning to enter data herself in a notebook computer. “If I don’t do it,” she says, “who will?”

Campbell and I differ on what’s killing her. As the actual victim, she looks for agents. She sees an evil alliance of deceptive managers and arrogant unions who are trashing her ideal of customer service. I, on the other hand, am afflicted with a double vision of the personal and the structural. I see a woman whose work is her life. I also see an economic system killing the city that Campbell lives in — the very city that invented the modern commodities market. Chicago’s post office is a relic of an older system of responsibilities, from which its own management in Washington is scrambling to distance itself. To survive in the corporatized world, the Postal Service now aspires to be just another medium — to be the same efficient collector of consumer dollars and transmitter of products that the Internet, for all its champions’ pious talk of “nonlinearity” and “pluralism,” is going to be. Technological capitalism is an infernal machine. It always has its way with us. If it doesn’t dismantle the Postal Service from without, it will steal its soul from within. The attachment of Americans to their post office is pure nostalgia. It’s the double vision of a people whose hearts don’t like what their desires have created.

When I finally get back home to Philadelphia, two inches of mail are waiting for me. William Henderson will be pleased to know that I’ve received four separate credit-card solicitations, each forwarded promptly and at no extra cost from one of my previous addresses. There are also bulk mailings from representatives whom I personally did not elect, bills for the credit cards I already have, four issues of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, whose yellow forwarding stickers urge me to Notify Sender of New Address, a large envelope with Ed McMahon’s face on it, three meaty Val-Paks which I’m certain hold interesting offers of discount carpet shampooing and bonus pizzas at Little Caesars, and a solitary first-class letter from a friend of mine in England. Although he must have sent it weeks ago, I tear it open urgently. He asks me why I haven’t written.

[1994]