And The Post Office Was Doing So Well...
It's happened again. A former post office employee went on a shooting rampage last night at a mail sorting facility in Santa Barbara. According to the AP, the woman had been given disability retirement back in 2003 for an "unspecified psychological reason."
Now, obviously the vast majority of the postal workers in this country are normal, stable people. It is a shame that a few bad apples (or as Bush would say, "evil doers") have brought this stigma to the post office. But this is not an isolated incident. It's happened so much that "going postal" is now part of our lexicon. The AP gave a list of "some" of the postal shooting incidents since 1986: they listed 12 including last night's. A dozen (plus) post office shootings in 20 years. Yikes.
So what is it about the post office? Does it attract mentally unstable people or does it make people mentally unstable? It's the chicken-and-the-egg mystery.
Now, obviously the vast majority of the postal workers in this country are normal, stable people. It is a shame that a few bad apples (or as Bush would say, "evil doers") have brought this stigma to the post office. But this is not an isolated incident. It's happened so much that "going postal" is now part of our lexicon. The AP gave a list of "some" of the postal shooting incidents since 1986: they listed 12 including last night's. A dozen (plus) post office shootings in 20 years. Yikes.
So what is it about the post office? Does it attract mentally unstable people or does it make people mentally unstable? It's the chicken-and-the-egg mystery.
posted by T @ 2:37 PM
1 Comments:
At 4:44 PM,
ThatBeeGirl said…
The first thing I thought of this morning when I heard the news was, "Hmmm. Someone else went postal." Part of the lexicon, indeed.
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