Post Office massacre....

The curse of an ex USPS employee "going postal" strikes again...

7 Dead in Calif. Post Office Shooting

Our facility has been under review by the Postal Inspection Service for about the last 3 months due to some of the rogue style managers that landed at our site; rejects from Chicago that should have been fired for misconduct. One manager, of whom I have written about on the forums before, has physically kicked employees in front of witnesses, been arrested on postal property for kicking in a union steward's door, and has been a complete disruption to the service in general... and yet no actions were being taken against him. Several folks had filed EEO's, grievances, an reported him to the threat assessment team and still he was running rampant about our facility creating tension in whatever unit they shuffled him off to when they would get too many complaints from the previous unit.

After having a confrontaion with him myself, with no results from local management all the way up the chain, I filed a complaint with the Inspection Service as to why this conduct was being tolerated in a ZERO tolerance facility....... anyway.... long story short.... the rogue lunatic at OUR facility has been under serious scrutiny and has been kept under tight reign from the new managers ASSIGNED, not elected, to our plant. Things have been a lot smoother for everyone lately. When I heard about the shooting in California on the news tonight, I couldn't help but wonder what the circumstances were that would cause this woman to flip out.

Folks at our plant have been concerned that the "MANAGER" will be the one to flip out, and not the employees that he has harassed. He has been known to shove equipment into other equipment without even concerning himself as to whether or not there might be an employee behind the containers; he's ruthless and he's a heavy drinker. I have heard at least ONE person say that if the idiot messed with him, he'd shoot him without blinking an eye. The guy that said it is not a man of many words, but when he speaks, you can pretty well be certain that he means what he says. I've been with the USPS 20+ years now and I've known the horror that runs through post offices throughout the country. I'm on my days off right now, but I'm sure that when I go in tomorrow morning, I need to be prepared for RED ALERT security measures because of the breech in security that allowed an ex postal employee onto the premises with this latest incident.

This is the worst shooting in the USPS since the Oklahoma tragedy 20 years ago, which claimed 14 lives; the incident that coined the phrase "going postal". We've had several shootings since by employees, but not as tragic as this one and the Oklahoma incident; the Royal Oak Michigan shooting was ranked 2nd worst until now.

List of Some Deadly Post Office Shootings

May God have mercy on the coworkers that witnessed this tragedy, and may he comfort the loved ones that have lost due to this senseless act of aggression that claimed innocent lives.

+1,000 from me

Sorry Ani, it's gotta be hard on you too! You take care and try to stay away from the asshole manager at your facility as much as possible. Maybe karma will have its way with him before too long. I remember your earlier posts about him.

Good luck and our prayers are with you and the above folks!

-Brad

Going postal: It's the cliche that refuses to recede into cliche.

It's a truly horrible thing, and not unique to this industry. The other sector in which people seem most likely to "go postal" is, oddly enough, academia. I'm sure there's been a lot of psyhco-social research done on this. I wonder what it says.

Really sorry about this. Hang in there.

Good God I remember reading your posts on this before. The amazing thing is that they never learn.

What is it with postal employees?

One of my relatives was captain on duty directly across the street at the Goleta Fire Station...

He's fazed, not usually so with the sucicides and drug OD's around the college.

The paramedics wer not able to save much, she was a good shot aparrently.

R

What a terrible tragedy.

Best,

Geoff

Ani,

I'm so sorry you have to live with that crap... It's a sign of totally inept and corrupt management that somebody like that could keep their job, much less get bumped up through the ranks so he could become someone else's problem. Maybe you and your coworkers could all get together and suggest he be promoted into the Human Relations Dept. That's where most other companys put their hiring mistakes.

To all others:

Boycott the violence! Email forever, snail mail never!

I believe the word that comes into play here is "politics". This particular manager has an ace in his pocket from somewhere or another. After he blew up and stormed out of a Manager's Meeting, slamming the door, where a Regional Manager was in attendance; he disappeared for 3 months without a word to anyone. The Lead Manager of Operations said that if the Manager of Operations (the lunatic) had not responded by a certain date, that he would not be allowed back on the premises. The date rolled on by and there were strict orders left with Attendance Control to have him escorted off of the property unless he could provide medical documentation for his absence.

Our entire district had a meeting for all of the head haunchos scheduled to meet for one week in Denver. When the lunatic manager KNEW all of the big dogs would be out of the office, he slid back in the door the very day after they left as though nothing at all had happened. He seated himself on a take-away tray line/conveyor belt (which presented a major "safety" concern) across the aisle from me and glared in my direction. With the orders in Attendance Control, and also the conditions on which he had last been present, I felt completely uncomfortable with him being there without authorization.

After the big dogs returned from Denver, the lunatic's paperwork for "STRESS LEAVE" cleared the medical unit and he was allowed to return to work with provisions to attend "Anger Management Classes".

This is simply ONE of hundreds of incidents that have occured.

Here's a link to some other businesses that have had fatal shootings.

http://www.disaster-management.net/workplace_shoot.htm

I'm sorry to hear that the federal government is running a hostile and unsafe work environment -- and that you've been in the middle of it.

I had a boss in the 80s we used to worry about. We were more concerned he might be a 'family annhiliator' since he had all the classic symptoms: extreme narcissm, heavy drinking, a (at the time) seriously spiraling financial situation (little or no money coming in and a $4000 monthly nut -- in 1984 dollars!)... and he was a gun nut.

Even after the financial situation improved dramatically (night and day, actually), I used to go in at 8 am and find him drunk in his office, his glassy eyes not quite focusing on anything, talking volubly -- and all too often gesturing with a pistol.

Any time I ever asked him not to point guns at me (and that was plenty) he would say, "It's not loaded."

Of course, it would come out like, "Itsh no' loaded."

Which would typically start me in on about how I was raised with guns and the first thing I learned is that a gun is always loaded until you've personally, thoroughly inspected it. This would -- of course -- go nowhere with him.

Strangely, my coworker (and his former sister in law) hit on the right tack:

"It's not polite."

And he would usually sheepishly agree and put the damn thing down.

Blue,

As horrible as the thought of privatization sounds to a 20+ year government employee; I almost feel that it might narrow the gap on how managers are selected. In a private sector, I can almost be certain that dead weight would not be promoted into positions of power and ALL persons in leadership roles would be required to have a comprehensive job knowledge in the positions they held. The manager in reference above is a blithering idiot and does not have a clue as to "how things work" in postal operations; he and I had our run in when he learned that I had extensive background in Quality Control and I had addressed failures in operations with higher management officials when I discovered delayed mails.

I had attempted to tell him of the 249 TRAYS of delayed mail and he sputtered his lips and waved his arms as to say, "Just get on out of here, I don't want to hear anything you have to say". Of course, I followed the chain of command and took it to the next appropriate level until the issue was addressed. There was only one man in between him and the top dog at the plant, and that person was not on site at the time. The incident went all the way to the top and came down hard for that much mail to have been delayed; some of it as much as 4 days.

He tried his best to issue me a Letter Of Warning at that time for failure to follow the chain of command. Fortunately, my knowledge of mail flow and operations was very well established and I was able to communicate one on one with the plant manager prior to this lunatic ever setting foot in our facility. The guy called me a worthless pimple on a butt the very minute he found out that I had been in Quality Control. My guess is that perhaps one of his units at another facility had been closely monitored by QC and he had been written up numerous times before. When I told the plant manager that I had attempted to notify the operations manager of the failure in mails and he sputtered his lips and waved his hands, the plant manager looked at him and said, "THAT COUNTS". From that point forward there was an instant hatred from him towards me. Right now he's on the all night shift as a result of a decision made from the newer plant manager.

Midinut,

I didn't get the promotion that I was applying for when this topic first came up, but I've had other opportunities that have made life a bit easier. I am no longer working under the stressful situation in which I was, and especially since the lunatic manager has been forced to go to the all night, things have settled down tremendously.

However, the current manager of Quality Control has expressed an interest in pulling me back into Quality Improvement. The tech that replaced me when I stepped down to begin my family has been gone on disability since August and is expected to retire. I worked with Greg, the manager of QI now, when he was only a QC Specialist and I was the solo tech on Tour-3; he was the supervisor on the all night shift and our schedules overlapped. He commended me on having gained our office national recognition for my testing results being within 0.02 % accuracy of an audit conducted by the Postal Inspection Service. My immediate supervisor, at the time, hadn't even mentioned it. The national recognition for our office was quite an honor.

Yesterday I dropped a note on Greg's desk telling him that I'm certainly interested in moving back over to the Inplant Support team as opposed to the operations side of things. Hopefully something will become of the opportunity since he knows my background first hand. Since he mentioned my name first, I'm "getting my hopes up"......................

The only set back is the scheduling requirements. I'll have to see what hours I'd be required to work before making the move. It would be nice to have an exempt status that would allow me to rotate from tour to tour if I can't be on daylight hours solely; but I would not want to get "stuck" on the all night or second shift permanently because it would take too much away from my home life and raising my kids. The second QI tech that notified me of the vacancy coming up in QI said that she thought the detail assignment was going to be on the daylight shift.... WHICH WOULD TOTALLY ROCK!!!

If I "were" to have to go to the all night shift and monitor the lunatic manager's area, I'd have to make sure to wear my suit of armor when entering his unit. The main difference in the situation would be that I would be outside of his jurisdiction and working directly with persons holding jurisdiction over HIS units. I'm not going to pass up a grand opportunity to get back into something I loved doing because of this joker; I'm just hoping that the position does not place me in a confrontational situation with him. My reportings will be directly to the QI manager, and by all rights, the operations manager has no right to say anything whatsoever to me; but it has happened in the past in units that I've had to write up.

Having read an account of the shootings, this gal sounds like she had been slipping into the abyss for some time. Carrying on vocal arguments with herself and such. Regardless of where she worked, she should have been remanded into psychiatric care quite awhile before...

While most workplaces specifically disallow employees to carry actual weapons, it is usually legal to carry pepper spray.

I have some extremely potent pepper spray on a keyring (with safety catch, etc). In a dangerous situation, it might be just enough to stop a tragedy in progress.

I'm a just a few miles from Goleta.

It turns out that she may have shot one of her former neighbors before going to the post office that night.

While a lot of people like to point to another cliche coming true, I think this instance is very different than past circumstances.

In the past, it's been an irate employee - irate because of work conditions, management, stress, etc - who instigated violence in the workplace. In other words, they snapped.

In this case, the shooter was clearly mentally ill, and "the voices in her head" made her do this, for whatever reason.

No, this doesn't justify her actions at all, but she could have loved her job for all we knew, and still committed this crime because of her mental illness...As opposed to a normally sane person driven to a certain point of extreme anger and frustration.

By and large the USPS has mitigated those problems experienced in the past as far as workplace violence, it is just an unfortunate circumstance that on the surface this incident happens to appear identical to those instances.