Everyone has a favourite kind of small news item – a story their eye jumps to first. I will always read stories about UFO sightings and stories about large docile animals living indoors (a classic of the genre is the cow/capybara/hippo that "thinks it's a dog"). But the one I pore over is the story of the postie or courier who has abandoned the mail.
This story is rare. In New Zealand it comes around once every year or two, though sometimes we have a dry spell for years and I wait for the story like a stargazer hungry for a meteor shower. The story is more common in the United States, where it takes the form of grizzled sentences like, "50-year-old Mark Wayne Thompson took mail from his rural postal route in Louisiana to his home in Pitkin, where from December 1, 2016 to May 1, 2017, he burned at least 20 tubs of mail." Mail abandonment in the US often involves fire, while here it usually involves a ditch.
The mail abandonment story is a sad story, a story of broken trust, disappointment and lost jobs. It usually begins with a good citizen going for a walk and coming upon something unspeakable – a pile of parcels lying in a ditch. We hear that the company responsible is taking the matter seriously and conducting a thorough investigation. The story may be accompanied by a photo of the abandoned parcels and people standing around them grimly, like construction workers standing around a hole in a road. We had a system, their postures say, and it has been broken.
We don't find out why exactly the postie renounced their duty but it's easy to speculate. Maybe they just lost the will. They were so tired. Couldn't bear to look at the mail anymore – the needy mass of it, the way it was never finished. People kept wanting more things and faster. Every day, another dog took exception to their presence. Every day, someone else stood at their letterbox in their dressing gown, tapping their foot. The postie was like a twig in Huka Falls, submerged, buffeted. So, they drove down a country lane and threw a whole load of mail out the window and felt a bit better.
The story seems particularly shocking because the abandonment of responsibility is so literal – all of those names and destinations unmet, left for the worms and the birds to do with what they will – and because the delivery of mail seems the very manifestation of all that is good and functioning in a society. The mail must get through. It's also shocking because a lot of us have had fantasies of doing something similarly passive-aggressive in our jobs but most of us have repressed those fantasies because that is what it means to live in a society.
