Raving About Disapproving Drivers; Ranting About Mail Dumping

RAVE: This is a personal thank you to the sixty-something couple who distracted me when we were both stopped at that red light on Division that feeds the Route 4 traffic. Our cars were side by side when I noticed them gesticulating wildly and shouting.

“What?” I mouthed, thinking I had a flat tire or that one of my headlights were out or I had my seatbelt caught in the door or had left my gas trap open again (all things I experienced more often than one person should).

They stared straight ahead, suddenly ignoring me.

Was this some weird AARP auto hazing – freak other drivers out and then, when they respond, act like they don’t exist?

“What?!” I actually yelled, doing some arm waving myself now.

The couple continued to ignore me.

Now I was a mixture of really pissed and really worried – in other words, my usual state of mental composure as the parent of two teenagers. I opened the passenger window and shouted, “What is the problem?” (Luckily it was a long light).

The man and woman turned their heads, stared at me with great loathing and then the man uttered two words: “Stop…texting.”

Huh? I was totally caught off guard. But then I realized that when we had initially stopped at the light, I had looked at my phone to check a street turn on the built-in GPS as I was dropping something off at an address I had never been to.

Now I agree with this couple, despite their passive-aggressive MO of dealing with the problem. Texting and driving is insane. Talking on the phone and driving – something I admit I do – is also insane, even with a hands-free device. Using the GPS and driving – which I clearly do – is also on the crazy side because despite the audio commands (case in point – I have a friend whose husband’s navigational app’s voice sounds like a Playboy Bunny and she swears he spends more time listening to it than he does to anyone else in his family), there is still a need to occasionally look at the map - in my case, a compulsive desire to see exactly where my little blue triangle of a car is on the road at that given moment.   

We really shouldn’t have needed a law to prevent such behavior. Simple logic should tell anyone that one cannot be a safe driver while using their phone in any context. It’s so obviously an accident waiting to happen that the insurance companies have come up with an acronym for it: DWD or Driving While Distracted. Here’s some scary stats from the Nationwide website:

• Distraction from cell phone use while driving (hand held or hands free) extends a driver's reaction as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent. (University of Utah)

• The No.1 source of driver inattention is use of a wireless device. (Virginia Tech/NHTSA)

• Drivers that use cell phones are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves. (NHTSA, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)

• 10 percent of drivers aged 16 to 24 years old are on their phone at any one time.

• Driving while distracted is a factor in 25 percent of police reported crashes.

• Driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent  (Carnegie Mellon)

Unfortunately, the concerned couple sped off (at around 50 mph in a 35 mph zone) before I could share any of this with them.

However, having read the facts myself, I think roadside pausing is in my future.

RANT: Once upon a time, the United States Postal Service was a big deal. It was sort of founded by Benjamin Franklin. The Postmaster General was a Cabinet-level post. The letters and papers it delivered had the power to transform lives and even countries. Now, like so many arms of our government, it’s a financial albatross that hemorrhages money as a statutory requirement.

Since Congress doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to do anything about it, a locum East Greenwich postal worker decided to allegedly take things into his own hands and dumped the mail on his route instead of delivering it. I am not sure who is worse – this guy or the mail carrier in Denver who was purportedly so focused on his job that he walked by a man who had collapsed and died on his front porch to deliver the mail (when later questioned, the postal worker said he thought it was a decoration leftover from Halloween).

Apparently, postal poop out is not all that unusual. In six months in 2011 (the most recent year the U.S. Postal Service internal audit figures are available for this category), there were 183 arrests and 370 administrative actions for "internal theft." That figure includes abandonment and hoarding cases, where the motive has remained constant since the days of penny postage: A worker gets overwhelmed or simply disinclined to finish his route. Some are worthy of a murder mystery – one of my favorites is an abandoned truck found in Santa Cruz, Calif., with the keys hanging in the door – inside, the police find no body or ransom note but 13,000 pieces of undelivered mail.

Apparently, our fair state is the original home of the first recorded letter toss. In 1874, Providence, R.I., postman Benjamin Salisbury was caught throwing mail into the ocean "to avoid the trouble of delivery."

But here’s the rub: For the USPS to realize that a dump is taking place, first someone has to notice. Which they did in East Greenwich. I have to say, I am impressed with the folks who realized that they weren’t receiving their bills at the end of the month and made the initial complaint. (Apparently, a number of "dead-letter cars" - old clunkers filled up like a junk-mail piñatas – have been discovered by mechanics and used-car dealers.) I have to admit, I would not have been so on top of it. When it comes to making monthly payments, I am completely Zen – if it  has not come, little Grasshopper, do not seek it.

The truth is, 99.9 percent of the stuff I get in the mail I don’t care about – like flyers, advertisements, Happy Spring cards from real estate agents, fundraising requests, magazines that are ads than articles and that I should save a tree read online and the like. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t want it. Unlike Kramer from Seinfeld, I need my daily delivery. When I get a piece of post with my name spelled correctly and computer-generated to look hand written, I feel happy, even if it’s a reminder card from the dentist to get my teeth cleaned. If it has my name on it, I am thrilled (I get mail; therefore I exist). My entire family feels the same way – we like our snail mail. And we love our mail carriers, these are people whose names we know, who we like to wave hello to and who realize that we forgot to activate a vacation stop delivery when our post piles up and hold it for us until they see us back home again. I know that in my dad’s neck of the woods, the mail carrier is our daily touchstone - if dad doesn’t pick up his mail, Pat (yes, that really is his name) has notified a neighbor to check in on him.

But I understand that we are on the losing side. The mail carrier’s supposed dump-and-duck was a wake up call that mail delivery’s door-to-door days are numbered. Probably this is a good thing. Maybe with central pick up locations we will see a return to the geezers – oops, I mean townies, oops, I mean Alan Clarke and buds – hanging out on Main Street and shooting the breeze with anyone who passes by. Which would be a delight. But the U.S. Government, in their infinite wisdom, will probably place the pick-ups in the outer reaches of town. Or maybe they will do away with the mail altogether and text everything to us – which we can read when we are parked on the side of the road.