Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

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.