Going Postal

Mike tells Sarah about the rash of mass shootings carried out by postal workers in the '80s and '90s, then brings out the debunkin' turducken.

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Transcript

Going Postal

Sarah: My convictions about love and writing are that they're basically like mushing. So, you have to just hold onto something that you don't know where it's going.

Mike: Do you want to tell me about your relationship with the phrase ‘going postal’? 

Sarah: I feel like it's a phrase that you heard a lot in the 90s. And the first thing I associated with is with Newman on Seinfeld. 

“Let me ask you something. What do you do for a living, Newman? 

I’m a United States postal worker. 

Are those the guys that always go crazy and come back with a gun and shoot everybody? 

Sometimes. 

Why is that? 

Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There's never a let up, it's relentless. Every day, it piles up more and more and more. You've got to get it out, but the more you get out, the more it keeps coming in and then the bar code reader breaks and then it is Publisher’s Clearinghouse Day.” (Clip from Seinfeld)

As someone who spends a lot of time reading about random crimes and when I was in Alaska, I was at a thrift store and bought a book called Murder at 40 Below, because that's the kind of thing that I do in my spare time. I cannot think of a single thing I've read about a postal worker committing a massacre or anything like that.

Mike: There were a series of shooting in the late 80s and early 90s committed by postal workers. And I guess the underlying thread of this, or the great glacial trend here, is that this was at a time when mass shootings got attention. There was one in Michigan where four people died and it was national news. It's interesting thinking now that some dude that kills four people at his workplace is not news. We don't hear about it. It makes the local news, but it's not something that the New York Times sends a reporter down there, or anybody feels the need to examine particularly, it's just background noise. It’s like car accidents. 

The big wave was between 1986, the first one was in 1986. And it's not that the postal mass shootings actually stopped, it's just that the country stopped paying attention to them. I was looking at a list the other day and the most recent one was in December of 2017, when a dude walked into the post office naked and killed his boss. And he was going to kill his boss's boss, but that person wasn't there that day, he drove to her house, and he shot her at her condo. 

There were 20 mass shootings in which 40 people died. So, what we're really talking about with the going postal period is these 20 shootings. And this was something that seemed to be happening all the time in the 1990s. There was one point when there were two of them on the same day in two different cities in the country. That added to the sense that there's a real rash, there's a real trend of why do postal workers go crazy? What is happening with these people? What's going on with the postal service that is making these people completely nuts? And that's where the jokes came from. And when you think it is actually really not cool that we had this cute phrase ‘going postal’, or people would use it in this flip way. “Oh, don't go postal, your soup is cold.” We're talking about lots of people that got killed; it was a really dark thing. It was something that really affected morale at the postal service. It was something that really affected the entire organization, had a huge response to this. There were congressional hearings and lots and lots, and lots of people died. It's funny that sort of the legacy of this is this cute phrase that showed up in the movie Clueless. We're talking about at least 35 people died in these various shootings and in the most horrific way. 

The kickoff to all of the media attention was in 1986 in Edmond, Oklahoma. When a guy walked into the post office and shot 14 people. The first guy that did this was Patrick Sherrill and he had been fired the day before he was about to be fired. He was going down the path toward being fired, disgruntled guy, former military and he went home, picked up a gun and came back and shot 14 people. I'm always interested in the media aspects of the way that the media tries to explain these things after they happen. There's a couple, there's a story in the New York Times and a story in the Washington Post, where they sent reporters to Edmond, Oklahoma in the aftermath of this killing to interview his colleagues and his friends and everybody that knew him to try to get some sort of explanation. 

The structure of this type of journalism is they go there, they interview whoever they can get. They've got a couple of days to talk to people and what they're basically left with is a series of details that don't really add up to anything. So reading these stories 20 years later, it's interesting that this was never really explained, nobody ever got to the bottom of this, but there's just these creepy details. He was a Marine and he really closely identified with being a Marine, but he was never actually sent overseas. He was never deployed, he just did training in various parts of the U.S., but never really got to act out any of his fantasies. Before he was working at the post office he worked at a radio shop, like back when there were radio shops. And he quit when his boss referred to him as ‘that young man’. That triggered him to the extent that he just stormed off. And again, there's all these weird little details. 

They interview his neighbor says she used to be sitting on the couch with her husband watching TV and she'd look out the window and there, he would be three feet outside their window looking into her window. The Washington Post reporter also interviewed a bunch of the neighbors and they said, yeah, we all just knew him as a weird peeping Tom. He would come out; he would stare at people on the street. He would stare into their windows. He would creep around the neighborhood and look at them. The woman who used to see him from her living room couch, she found out later after the police were investigating, that he had a telescope pointed at her living room and that he used to watch her from his living room. What she said was, “I didn't even get undressed in there”. So even by the standards of weird perviness, it's weird. It doesn't seem like he was avoider or anything, it seems like he just liked watching people and he felt really alienated. He was living in his mother's house. It wasn't clear that he had a lot of friends. 

What's so interesting about these old stories is basically they're just a series of details that just trail off. There's nothing, there's never a smoking gun, mentally. There's never any sufficient explanation for what would drive somebody to kill 14 people and injure 20 more. It is a huge shooting. 

Sarah: That reminds me of researching Jeffrey Dahmer, which of course I got really into when I moved to Wisconsin. You would read in the books about him and they go to such great lengths for the authors to be like, “he lived in a scary house, on a scary street” and everything about him as supposed to be sinister in some way. But the picture that I always ended up with was like, what a lonely guy.  Once they arrested him and he was in custody and they got his medication stabilized, he was just like, “I don't know why I did that”, and he would try to explain it, but couldn't really.

Mike: The last postal shooting that gets attention is in 2006. When a woman named Jennifer San Marco walks into a post office in Goleta, California with a handgun and she shoots six people. And it is to this day it is the deadliest shooting ever carried out by a woman. She was fired from the postal service in 2003, she ends up moving to New Mexico. But then in 2006 she comes back, she walks in, she shoots the door person then she goes to her former workstation. It's not clear if she even knows the person who has replaced her at her desk, but she walks to her former desk and shoots that person.

The most chilling detail from this is that there's a guy who is listening to his headphones. He does not hear the screaming, the shooting, the running, anything, and she just walks up behind him and shoots him in the head. Awful, no terror, no anything, just lights out. 

This is a paragraph from one of these articles where they go back and try to understand what happened and try to pull a human out of this inhuman behavior. “To her neighbors she was the woman who shouted furiously to herself, who ordered food at restaurants and bolted out the door before eating it, who knelt in prayer at the roadside and who peeled off her clothes in random parking lots.” 

All you can really conclude from this is, wow, she sounds weird. 

Sarah: To her neighbors, she was a woman who exhibited symptoms of mental illness that no one ever dealt with. maybe for some reason. Who knows. 

Mike: Yeah. Underneath all of this, she lives in a small town in New Mexico. There's no mental health treatment. She is fired from her job at the post office for extremely disturbing behavior, for making threats, for making extreme racist comments. She started a newsletter called The Racist News, where she had all of these weird ideas about immigration and eugenics and whatever. Of course it never gets off the ground, but she filed a license. That's one of the only paperwork that's available for her.

I mean, reading these old descriptions of these shootings, it just makes you realize the extent to which all human behavior is unexplainable to a certain extent, right? The way that your parents act is unexplainable, the way that your partner acts is unexplainable, it's always a black box, and it's only in these shootings that we need some decoder ring, some way of understanding what could have led somebody to this. 

How could we have prevented it? If you think about anything, why did I brush my teeth this morning? Why am I recording this podcast with you? Why do I take the bus some days and ride my bike other days? All human behavior is unexplainable and so it's not that journalist shouldn't try to understand it. It's just the fundamental futility of it becomes very clear in these extreme incidents, but on a day-to-day basis, it's just futile. 

Sarah: Probably because I'm so dispositional optimistic. I see it as this really useful thing to realize that anytime you think you have to firm of a handle on why someone behaved the way they did or any time you really think something that's proof that you're not taking whatever you're working on seriously enough. It's like an episode of Law and Order where they make an arrest 10 minutes in, you're like, oh no, this isn't going to go well for them. They're going to have to prosecute someone else because it'll be a dead end. You know, anytime that I think I know anything, it's mostly a clue that I am confused. 

Mike: That's a good rule probably as a journalist, here's never going to be a sufficient explanation. All you can get is these weird little clues and these weird little spikes of human behavior that jut out of other people, and you can grab onto them, but you never know where they're coming from or what their origin is.

So right after the shootings, there is an attempt on the part of the postal service to understand what caused them. Obviously, they are extremely concerned; Congress is concerned. Everybody's concerned, the entire country is talking about this. Of course, the postal service is extremely opposed to the phrase ‘going postal’ because it's awful. The first thing they do is they announce all these reviews of their internal background check policies. It turns out the postal service, because it's a quasi-governmental organization, was hiring a lot of former military people and saw itself as having this social mission. So they would hire people that couldn't get jobs elsewhere. They would hire people with sketchy employment histories. They would hire people with some mental illness. They knew that this was part of their mission as an organization.

And so the initial rounds of blame right after all the shootings are about individuals. Why are you hiring all of these people that might have mental illness in their past, might have access to guns, might have a history of violence? One of the reports notes that 43% of postal employees in the 1990s had some form of military experience. This is where the initial blame goes, is why are you hiring these people without adequate background checks? You're not calling their previous employers. You don't have anything in place to make sure that people like this woman, San Marco, who are clearly showing mental illness problems and clearly making threats and clearly doing things that are very troubling. Why aren't these people being dealt with? Why aren't these threats being reported? There's lots of talk about how the unions failed, that the unions knew that she was making weird threats, but they weren't telling it to management because they wanted to protect workers. They don't want workers to start being fired for their mental illness problems, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 

The first round of explanations is all about the people, the characteristics of the people who are doing the shootings, and what is it about these people that we can prevent them from getting jobs at the post office, and maybe they'll get jobs at Burger King and Burger King will have a bunch of mass shootings. Let's push this problem on to everybody else. So, that then of course, leads to a backlash where there have to be structural issues at play. It is not just that these individuals are to blame, people with military histories all over the country. They're only shooting people at the post office. 

So I'm going to debunk the original explanation. I'm going to debunk the first wave of these shootings, and then I'm going to debunk the debunking. I know, it's ‘whomp’ inception horns.  

Sarah: Yeah, it is a triple debunk with a debunk pride inside of a debunkfurt, it is great. 

Mike: It is a debunking turducken. The first thing to know, the first thing to debunk, is that postal workers are not particularly likely to be killed. There is a whole field of epidemiology called Workplace Homicide. So the third leading cause of death of workers in the United States is homicide, and postal service workers are not more likely to be killed than anybody else. So the number one cause of death for U.S. workers is road accidents. Basically, you're a Microsoft employee and you're driving from one building to another, and you get a standard issue freeway car accident, and you die. But because you happen to be on the clock at that time, it's classified as a workplace death. So that is number one. Truck drivers, taxi drivers have a death rate 150 times higher than postal service workers. It's like more taxi drivers die than cops. Taxi drivers are one of those dangerous jobs in America, simply because driving is dangerous, and they're also being held up. There's a bunch of other reasons why being a taxi driver is really dangerous, but being a truck driver is dangerous as well, so that's the number one cause of death. Number two cause of death is accidents, what you think of when you think of workplace deaths, somebody falls off a ladder at a construction site. , whatever tThat's also that's about, I think it's around 20% of the deaths. Then around 10% of workplace deaths every year are homicides.

Sarah: That is a lot. 

Mike: It's a lot, dude. It's like thousands of people have been killed and all these reports that. And investigate the postal service afterwards. They're all noting that something like 7,000 people have been killed at work in the last 20 years, and “only 40” of them have been postal workers. It is really a much larger problem than just the postal service. Most of the workplace homicides are robberies, robberies gone wrong. SoSo, retail workers, especially things like 7seven -Eleven, things that are open 24 hours, are 8eight times more likely to die than postal workers. 

 But then. But the second largest group of homicides at work is women being killed by their partners. So iSo it becomes an extension of domestic violence, b. Basically. Gguys mad at their girlfriendsgirlfriends snap, t. They know where to find their girlfriend. They walk into whatever office she works in, whatever store she works in, a. And they shoot her in the head and then they shoot themselves or they get arrested or whatever. 

It's awful. TSo that's 40% of workplace homicides are women being killed by their partners at work. 

TSo the third category of workplace homicides is disgruntled employees, so . So employees killing other employees. A. And this is the debunking of the debunking. So postal service workers are not particularly more likely to die at work. 

However, they are extremely more likely to die a. At the hands of other employees. So postal service workers are around three quarters of 1% of all employees in the U. S., it's about 900,000 workers. It's the second largest civilian workforce a. After Walmart. , they, Tthey make up 13% of employees killed by other employees. SoThis this then starts the kind of mystery solving of why are employees killing other employees? 

What's interesting w. When you go back,  to all these incidents throughout the 80seighties and 90snight, t The vast majority of them are not domestic violence, they're not random robberies, they are mostly p. People coming back to work to kill their bosses. It is a very particular kind of shooting that happens at post offices. TSo this guy, Patrick k, Sherill,arelle the guy who started off everything, . The, he killed 14 people, he deliberately showed up to work early so that he wouldn't kill any customers because . Cause he considered customers innocent, and he considered everybody who works at the post office guilty by association. 

So Tthere's actually a literature on this called Mmurder Bby Pproxy. Where people put identities of their victims onto others, so . So you kill your children because you see them as an extension of your wife. YSo you hate your wife so much that anyone that is associated with her, you have to kill them. A. And so what many of these murders are, is actually murder by proxy.

roxy. We are thinking that every single person who works at the post office, your relationship with the post office is so toxic, that anyone who works there is guilty, and a. And anyone who works there is part of the abuse t. That you've been suffering. So that's what makes sense about many of these guys that go there and shoot everybody at the post office because they're seeing everyone is tainted. Even if I don't know you, even if we haven't worked together, even if you haven't been terrible to me, because you work at the post office, you are tainted by this association. So And so that's where this vengeance comes from. 

A. And so there's this really chilling 1995 review of workplace homicides, and they call them ‘workplace avengers’. 

This is a particular kind of homicide in which people come back and they get vengeance on their coworkers. TAnd this report notes that almost all of these shooters are middle aged, white men. Most of them don't have histories of mental illness. Most of them don't have histories of being in the military. What they have is w. What we would call now, ‘economic anxiety’, b. Basically. “Tthhe vengeful worker is typically a middle age, white man who faces termination in a worsening economy.” This is what the report says, “Th. The middle age, white male sees little opportunity for finding another job, and suspects that all the breaks are going to younger competitors or to blacks, women, and immigrants.”

This is extremely prescient and fascinating that this came out in 1995. Yeah. This form of violence. iIs a kind of offshoot of these men feeling like, ‘I'm at my peak earning potential. I should be having a pension. I should be having great jobs. I should be having all of this prosperity. A. And yet I'm being abused by my boss, .

I'm doing this extremely repetitive job. I'm falling back down the ladder, r. I'm not making it, and And I'm surrounded by other employees who are different demographics than me a. And I see them excelling. WAnd why are they getting all these breaks a? And I'm not?’ . TAnd so that metastasizes in their minds and becomes this anger that they act out whenever they look around at their colleagues. They see them as emblematic of their own .failures. 

So, when younger workers get mad at their bosses, oftentimes they're having a fight with their boss, and it escalates into basically a fistfight. That's how younger dudes deal with these situations. They're like, fuck you, fuck this job, and they walk off the job and that's about it. Whereas older workers, they seethe for much longer. It becomes this thing where it's building up in them, but they're not talking about it, they have no outlet for it, and then they come back with a gun. 

Sarah: So we have this amazing pressure cooker type situation where we take capitalist anxiety, plus the way that American capitalist society emotionally isolates white male - and males in general, but especially white males - because they can afford to emotionally isolate themselves. We got homicides out of that. It’s funny because on one level, every individual person is this incredibly complex mystery that we can never claim to understand very deeply. But then a lot of the times too, I feel like if this were a Twilight Zone episode, the twist at the end of so many of these atrocities that we look at, these spates of seemingly random violence in America at the bottom, you're just like, oh look, it's capitalism. It was capitalism all along.

Mike: One of the shootings in 1991 in Michigan, one of these shootings that never would get news coverage now because he quote/unquote ‘only killed four people’. One of the quotes from his colleagues is they pushed the wrong guy too far. He's a former military guy, same sort of profile, middle-aged white dude. I think ‘they pushed the wrong guy too far’ gets at the complex interplay between the characteristics of these individuals. And also the structural stuff that it's clear that you can't just say, oh, the postal service is bad. So of course, everybody's killing everyone, that makes no sense. There's lots of workplaces that are really bad in America. 

Sarah: Yeah. Why aren't there more massacres at Amazon?

Mike: Exactly, what is going on structurally? What's going on at the postal service that is activating these guys? Why are all of these middle agedmiddle-aged men in the postal service lashing out at their colleagues and employers? It's extreme behavior to go to work, kill your boss, find your boss's boss not in her office and go to her house and kill her. You have to wonder what the workplace circumstance is. There's clearly something wrong with the individual, but for an individual to lash out in that particular way, there also has to be something wrong with the workplace.

This is where we get into the real Michael Hobbes’ bait of all of the structural things that have happened to the post office since the 1970s. The post office, I don't know if you know this, the post office is in a huge budget crisis. It's basically been in a sliding, glacial, worsening, terrible budget crisis since the 1980s. People are not sending mail anymore for obvious, internet-related reasons. The postal service used to be a department of a cabinet, like the Department of Energy, the Department of Education. And then people, this is in the 1970s, people started asking questions of well, the postal service is selling a service, no other, the Department of Energy, isn't selling regulation, the FBI isn't selling investigations. So we've got this quasi-business of the postal service that is solvent. It's a functioning business. So why is it subject to budgetary increases and decreases according to the tax revenues of the country? So, when there's a recession, postal service revenues get cut, but that doesn't make sense because the postal service is actually serving customers and is doing really well. People within the postal service want to get it out of the vicissitudes of this boom-and-bust cycle of being on national budgets. Congress agrees, postal service does a whole lobbying effort. Fifteen years it's in and out of the budget, blah, blah. 

By the late eighties, it finally gets spun off and becomes an independent agency. Congress also passes all these weird laws that say that it has to balance its budget every year. Congress still sets the rates for stamps. The postal service is supposed to be operating a business, but it can't actually set its own prices. Now that there's so much less mail than there used to be, the postal service has been lobbying for years to have five days a week of deliveries that would help tremendously. But Congress says ‘no’ because people need to get their medications. There's all these other governmental functioning, governmental reasons why you're not allowed to cut your services. So now the postal service for years has been in this quasi-governmental realm where it's tightly regulated, but it's supposed to be operating as if it's not regulated. 

One of the weirdest things. So they have all these employees that are retired, all these pensions getting postal service employees who aren't on Medicare. It makes no sense. So according to, I'm not clear on exactly why this happened, but postal service employees are getting private health insurance, which is insanely more expensive than Medicare, rather than just getting the government provided one. Every year the postal services spending $6 billion on its retirees because it's providing them with healthcare as if they're 45, but they're extremely expensive because they're old. So there's all these weird, whenever you look into it like why does the postal service work like this? 

There's also a law that the postal service is not allowed to offer non postal services. In France, they offer banking. In Sweden, they do a thing where if you don't have email, they will print out emails and deliver them to you and they get more money. When I lived in Denmark, you could buy concert tickets at postal services because it's all semi-privatized and they're able to do these other things that are a little bit more profitable and that subsidizes the actual mail delivery. For whatever reason, the postal service in America is barred by law from doing anything other than delivering mail. 

Sarah: Whenever you go in there, they're both overworked and lonely. They're like, I can't keep up with all of this, and also no one ever comes in here. 

Mike: The budget problems in the 90s during all the shootings were not as bad as they are now. But what you find in these old, I read this fascinating 1994 GAO report in the midst of all these shootings, where it is supposed to be investigating the shootings, but the entire report ends up being about the working conditions at the postal service that they're already on this path where they're totally insolvent. They don't have enough money. It's hard for them to hire people. So, what they do is they start giving more overtime to their existing employees. Between 1988 and 1992 overtime hours doubled, they interview these employees, and they find some of them are working six days a week and every other Sunday. So, what that means is you're working six days a week, then the Sunday, then another six days, you're working 13 days in a row and people are saying that they've been doing this for two years. 

One of the weird paradoxes of this is that morale among urban postal workers is extremely low. Morale among rural postal workers is extremely high, they love their jobs. And the difference is the rural postal workers are salaried. They get the same amount of money every week and their boss says, “Steve, by Friday you have to deliver all the mail.” And Steve goes, “Okay.” He's in charge of everything. He can start in this neighborhood. He can start on this other street. He can go slowly. He can go quickly. He can leave early. He can leave late. He's in charge of everything and if you work some extra hours to get the mail delivered, that's fine.

Whereas the urban postal services, one of the reports I read said that there's 10 employees for every manager, which is an insane ratio. What they've done in this context of ‘do more with less’ is they've tried to squeeze as much efficiency out of their existing employees as possible. So what that means is they have meetings every single morning with every single postal worker to ask them what they're going to do today and how long it's going to take them? You have to negotiate with your boss every morning. The first thing you do, negotiate with your boss every morning of what you're going to get done. You have no independence, your boss is totally micromanaging you. Can you imagine coming into work and your boss being like, “Oh, you have to write 800 words today, and you have to write the intro, and you have to interview two people, and you have to get six great quotes for me.” This idea that you're not in charge of what you're going to read about what you going to learn, what you're going to do, what you're going to produce that day is so demoralizing. Basically, it's not necessarily that the work is monotonous though, it is, it’s not necessarily that it is super poorly paid, it actually pays okay. There's decent conditions and you're unionized everything else. It's basically that people don't feel any autonomy. They feel totally out of control of their own work. And their bosses are just telling them every minute of every day, what they should be doing. Even these tiny things, I want to start in this neighborhood because I like to take a break and have a coffee at this nice cafe. They can't do that because they have to justify to their boss.

Sarah: I think the lesson here is that you can abuse workers in all sorts of ways, and they'll soldier on for a long time, if you're not paying them enough, or if they're doing stuff that's physically taxing. But if you start making them account for every second of their time, in a way that makes them conscious of the fact, like when they lose plausible deniability about being a cog in a machine, that's when you have to think that maybe you've pushed them a little bit too far. It reminds me that it, you ever read Studs Terkel’s, Working?

Mike: Yeah. 

Sarah: Yeah, and it's about 650 pages long. You know, narrative after narrative of people talking about their jobs and what they do like about them and what they don't like about them. The thing that comes up over and over and over again, what people find most demoralizing is not feeling like they're human when they're at work. Doing something like working on an assembly line where it's been calculated, that it takes a person four seconds to do this particular task. So, they have four seconds to do it and where their brain just stops existing because they've literally scheduled out every second of their day and they know they're not doing any of it because of what they actually want to be doing. 

Mike: We all know we're cogs in a machine to some extent, but being reminded of it can often be very hurtful. And especially reminding them of something that is true over and over and over again. We all know that we can be fired at any moment, whatever, but imagine if you came in every day, said hey, if you don't do this, I'll fire you. If you don't do this, I'll fire you. That is underneath every conversation but making that explicit would be extremely dehumanizing. 

Sarah: There is logic to it. I can see the logic to it where if your life has become something that you were not charge of at all, and you're being solvently employed means that you have to agree to be turned into a machine. And then maybe even that is going to get taken away from you or you feel like it is, or it has been. Then if you do figure the people at the post office, these personifications of the system that has destroyed your psyche, than it does make sense to vent your rage on them, however that works. I can see the mechanics of it. 

Mike: Yeah. There's one of these surveys, I think that's cited in the GEO report, is that something like 76% of postal employees had received abuse from their bosses. And the GEO report also looks into how difficult it is for the bosses. Because it is a unionized workforce, they essentially can't fire people. So they have a lot of these people that are sleepwalking through the job. The only way to get fired from the postal service is to not show up on time. That's the most important thing for the job. Whereas actual job performance is really not something that's going to get you fired. So the bosses feel like they have to abuse the employees. They have to threaten the employees to get them to produce, because that's the only way that they can get productivity out of them is by threatening them with physical violence, by threatening them with bullying tactics, basically. Just like the shooters, I don't want to take responsibility away from these bosses for acting monstrously, but it's just the structure is such that the employees are overworked, the bosses are overworked. The bosses also feel emasculated because they can't do what they're supposed to be doing and making the company more efficient. The workers can't do what they want to do, which is work in a way that makes them happier, more productive, whatever. And so all the way down the chain everybody's pissed off. Everybody's sad and angry, and everybody acts toward each other in ways that are extremely antisocial and extremely perfect for creating unhappy people. 

So what I kept thinking, reading these old reports, is it's a story of austerity, it’s a story of what it feels like to be under these ‘do more with less conditions’, that in a situation where you have surplus funding, you have time to think about creative ways to work. You have time to have meetings together, team building things or culture building things. What profits allow you to do is little extra things to make work tolerable. And in a situation with no money, you're trying to narrow the work down to only the productive components and only the efficient components and make it as effective as possible. But nobody is as effective as possible, nobody is perfectly effective. Nobody never checks their personal email at work. You can't build filter out all of these human aspects of work. It's just really hard to do those things under conditions of austerity that just make everybody terrible. I don't know how else to put it. 

I keep thinking of these management books that are written about how Google has these genius management techniques; they're structured differently, and their org chart is non horizontal and blah, blah, blah. I always feel like so much of that efficiency or so much of that innovation is just from the fact that it's a wildly profitable company and they don't have to think that hard about squeezing efficiency out of every single employee. They give people room to be creative. And when you have that room, that's what happens. It's really about the room. It's not necessarily about trying to get everybody to be this perfect little cog. 

Sarah: Or that if you are in a time of austerity or a perceived austerity, then the worker is going to be the first person who suffers. It's going to travel from the bottom to the top in terms of who gets squeezed and who has more hours that need to be somehow forcibly removed from them. It starts to feel like this weird extraction surgery that we're performing on people. 

What this makes me wonder too, is if we're going to start seeing gig economy mass shootings. And the problem with that is that in the gig economy, you don't have a workplace. Will people start coming into we work or something like that? Every job I've had essentially has been one where I wasn't expected by any single employer to make a living on what they were paying me. I feel like my entire life as a productive member of this economy has been gig economy based in one way or another. And what that means is that I have no sense of my employers feeling any sense of responsibility for my continued well-being. They're like individual clients. It makes it hard to feel a lot of animosity for any individual place that isn't paying me on time or something like that. I don't belong to any employer in a way that maybe you need to have a sense of being owned by somebody to have that feeling of being able to vent all of your frustration. 

Mike: It dilutes your frustration across five bosses rather than one boss that becomes your Murder by Proxy vessel, you put all of your anger into, rather than a specific individual. You see in all these cases is they put all of their anger onto one individual, their direct boss. That doesn't work as well for gig workers, because oftentimes it's the structure that you're angry at or the entire situation that you're angry at. It’s not one boss saying, “drive more hours, drive more hours, drive more hours”. It's just, you look at your paychecks, and you have to drive more hours. It isn't this kind of day-to-day abuse type of situation. 

Sarah: Yeah. So maybe also you can blame yourself in a gig economy.

Mike: Which of course is what capitalism tells you to do at all times. And it's all your fault if you're not earning enough money. 

Sarah: Yes. And then they're all the congratulatory ads and little fluff pieces about this Uber driver went into labor and still kept picking up people at the airport.

Mike: Oh my God. That's like genre of feel-good stories is so dark.  

Sarah: It is so dark. It's so terrifying and you're like, how's the baby, you know? They're supposed to be inspirational and it's such a literally puritanical thing as you can always work harder, you can always work more.

Mike: I'm a big structural explanations guy. But in the same way, you see these New York Times reporters flailing to explain the individual factors that would drive someone to kill 14 people. I'm also struggling to explain the structural factors that would drive someone to kill 14 people, because lots of workplaces in America are really abusive and lots of government agencies are operating under brutal conditions of austerity. Still, to me, the structural explanations are more interesting, but I don't know if they're more accurate. I don't know if this provides a better explanation than anything else. Whether it's structural or individual, there's no explaining why somebody would kill 14 people. There's no explaining why there were 20 of these shootings. Ultimately nothing makes sense. I think it's interesting that this guy looked into windows, and I think it's interesting that conditions of austerity have wide ranging, profound consequences on every level of employee. But ultimately, I don't think there is any explanation. 

I'm writing this article about obesity right now and I keep asking people playing devil's advocate and asking people, what about personal responsibility? What about environments, and going back and forth? And what so many doctors have said to me, is that there's no such thing as a problem that is only personal responsible or is only environment, that doesn't exist. So, it's a little bit silly to even have the debate or try to split the apple 70/30, 50/50, 60/40, whatever, that everything is going to be structural and everything is going to be personal. And ultimately these shootings make no sense. You can even cut these out of that sentence. 

Looking back on them, I keep thinking about what constitutes a trend or how we decide as a country to be concerned about something. At the same time, there were all these shootings at postal offices. They were also, whatever, 120,000 car crashes. There were thousands of women that were killed by their partners in their offices. And there were all these other things, but we didn't decide those were a trend. We decided that postal workers killing people was a trend and so for a while, we focused on them, and it was a trend and there was a cute little phrase that we came up with to explain them. And then the shootings kept happening, but we stopped calling them a trend. 

I always think of Imagined Communities, that book they make you read in grad school like 4 times.  We are an imagined community, and part of an imagined community is deciding what we're going to worry about together. For a while we decided we were going to worry about postal workers. We were going to worry about the demons that might be delivering our mail, this juxtaposition of the quotidian and the grave. And after Goleta, California, after this woman basically who killed six people, set the bar at six people. So any mass shooting at a postal office of less than six people, it didn't make the news anymore. So we just decided we weren't going to care about it anymore. 

Sarah: It's so darkly, comedic to think about how we have become so jaded.

Mike: Some of it is also the definition of news, right? That what is news? 

Sarah: It is something that doesn't happen constantly. 

Mike: Exactly. So people getting the flu is not news because millions of us get the flu every day, we do not put that on the front page of the newspaper. And after a while, there were so many of these shootings and normal shootings and suicide shootings and whatever else that we just stopped paying attention to them. I think one of the macabre outcomes of Columbine is that we stopped thinking of school shootings where less than 13 people were killed as serious. That raised the bar and now we only hear about mass shooters that raised the bar and set a record. We hear about the record setting shootings, but we don't hear about that every day, two, three people, this naked guy that walked into the post office and killed two people. It was a blip on the local news. 

I do think that we moved from postal shootings to school shootings. I think that became the paradigmatic thing that we worry about when it comes to guns in America. We started worrying about mass shootings in schools because it was children. It was innocence, whereas in postal worker shootings, it's sort of mean bosses and disturbed individuals. There's less of a biblical perfect story element of it because it's bad people shooting other bad people. 

Sarah: Yeah. Another thing that I think generally happens in the cases that I've looked at is that the more we become enamored with the idea of the child, the more the actual child suffers.

Mike: What do you mean? 

Sarah: You know, this is going back to the satanic panic. But at the time when we felt that we had recently discovered child sexual abuse in the 80s, then we had this desire to act on behalf of the child and to protect the child. One of the things that comes from that is that completely normal childhood behaviors are pathologized. So, things like small children masturbating or asking questions about body parts are seen as necessarily the results of abuse and trauma. When it's often just a child behaving like a child or the fixation that the pro-life movement has on the idea of the baby. The idea of the fetus means that babies and children being brought into the world who can't possibly be cared for, where there is no money to care for because we cannot allocate it. 

What's funny too, is that there was a case recently where a teenage girl was murdered at high school by her ex-boyfriend and it was a dovetailing with that kind of workplace shooting where a disgruntled, former partner or current partner shows up and kills a woman at work. I cannot think of a single news story that I've encountered, or a headline about that kind of a killing. I'm impressed that we actually got it together enough to gather enough data because I feel like often when this sort of thing happens, we do a few scattershot and inconclusive studies and then move on. 

Mike: It's amazing that there are all these evaluations that are done. This happens every time, this happens with every institution, there's always these evaluations done and they're usually really good and nobody pays attention to them. So all of the postal shootings were front page news, especially the one with the woman, because that's so rare. Then when a big 249-page report comes out based on, I think it was 3,000 interviews with postal workers, it's page 34 and all of these systematic under-funding systematic abuse, systematic problems with the postal service are a footnote. Oh, by the way, remember those shootings? Yeah, it turns out that this entire organization is complicit. Anyway, next page. 

This is another Imagined Community thing is that it's so hard to make explanations news. That events are always news, but it takes a long time for us to understand why they happened. The explanations ended up getting shoved into a file drawer, or they sit in PDFs on the GAO website, which is where I found this, and never get talked about, never get reported on, most of the stories about these reports were two or three paragraphs in the New York Times or Washington Post. We never remember these events enough to really want to explain them.

Sarah: That drives me absolutely crazy. The biggest issue that you and I both face as journalist is the thing that we are best at doing and want to do most of the time if given the choice of anything is to be like, remember that thing that happened 30 years ago. Well, you might've thought that it was about this, but it was actually about all these other things. It makes me think of how I grew up watching so many episodes of things like Unsolved Mysteries. It was always 22 minutes of how this mysterious thing happened. We'll basically never know, and then you watch another one. We talk constantly about how we want answers, but we often have the opportunity to seek them out or to listen to them and just get bored by them, right? 

Mike: I think the worst form of journalistic bias is the bias for novelty. Most things don't get explained through new and sexy and interesting explanations. Most of them get explained through expected explanations. It actually makes a lot of sense that under conditions of underfunding, you would squeeze your employees. You would make them work longer hours. You would drive them harder. And people under those conditions obviously act out in really anti-social, damaging ways. That's not all that interesting. That's not all that unexpected. That's not something that makes you sit up and go, wow. Whereas this guy trained a telescope on his neighbor's lawn is fucking weird. And whereas this institution is underfunded, therefore, it is messy and difficult and hard to fix. That's just the same old story and so I can see why editors put these things on page 17. That's why these reports, I think always get ignored is because they're always multifactorial. They're always prosaic. They're always, well, no one can say for sure what the explanation is, but here are 13 different factors. One of them has to be weighed against the other and we'll never know how much each one of them contributed. That's not all that interesting thing to write about.  

Sarah: This also relates to my frustration about the fact that there were basically no movies about Appellate Law, which trust me, I lose sleep over. And how there's one, I think it's Reversal of Fortune, and I love it. 

Mike: I love that movie.

Sarah: It's so good. And Ron Silver and Jeremy Irons have a ‘will they or won't they’, you know.  

Mike: I had a crush on Jeremy Irons, he's like the oldest man I've ever had a crush on. My God, even in like Diehard: With a Vengeance. Him in the tank top, I know he's 74, but it just like works for me.

Sarah: The implication too, is that character was just so fancy that he had to be a sex criminal a little bit. He was so aristocratic that he had to have done something weird. You know we have a hard time with trial narratives generally because trials don't tend to be all that narratively excited. And then appeals, which I think are the most fascinating thing on earth are just so hard to dramatize because the whole point is that you go back to you look at the original trial and the transcript and the sanctuary, the original narrative set it was. Then you flip it around and are like, this was wrong, this was wrong, this was wrong, this was wrong. He did all of this wrong. He suggests very politely that certain things were mishandled, or a key piece of forensic evidence actually doesn't hold up. This test that was administered actually has one-third false positives and so how does that affect the integrity of the entire case? It's just fascinating, because you're taking apart something that once was presented as a whole and showing how it doesn't actually function, but you think that we would like it in narrative form because detective stories are always about taking what seemed to be a hole that worked like a functioning small town or a story. Then showing how all of these things were actually something completely different. 

Mike: That's essentially the structure of 12 Angry Men. You've got all these details. They are super guilt defying. I don't know what the word is for that. And then you go through them one by one, and you find out they're not guilt defying, and it's actually pretty cool. But we just have difficulty doing that together. Doing that as a society or maintaining our interest long enough to still want to unravel the mystery years after it happened. These GAO reports came out a decade after the postal shootings and people had chalked it up to a bunch of weirdos, former Marine guys who got the wrong type of job, people weren't interested enough to go back and edit them.

Sarah: Once again, I've learned that it's amazing how much we can forget as a society, and this is something that I really would have thought with how much time I dedicate to researching morbid topics, that I would have had some kind of vague awareness of. But even if we're left with inconclusive answers about how to ethically practice journalism and how to somehow mitigate the effects of workplace abuse. Even if we don't know the answers to that, at least I know that I am continually justified in spending more time reading about depressing topics. 

Mike: All that I have learned is that I should tip my postal worker. They have it really tough and I should be super nice to them, and everybody has an interior life. I mean, I guess I knew that already.

Sarah: Tip your postal worker and everyone has an interior life. 

Mike: Yay.