Do you ever get tired of opening your mailbox and finding a pile of junk mail? I sure do! And as I walk back to my apartment, junk mail in hand, I dump it in the first garbage that I see.
I know that I should recycle it, but I’m so irritated by this bombardment of solicitations that I just want to vent. And somewhere in my pea-sized-brain, I think that I am really sticking it to the “man” by tossing it away, without even looking at it. Like I just wasted the advertiser’s money and it didn’t cost me a thing.
When I talk to my coworkers they express the same amount of hate for junk mail. So why do they keep leaving it? Somebody must be making a profit somewhere. The advertisers? The printers? The post office? Maybe all of them! If I thought that I could trust my mailman, then I might be willing to slip him a twenty to skip my daily dose of solicitations.
In Ralleigh (North Carolina), Steve Padgett, a former mail carrier, did it for free and the joyful neighborhoods where he worked knighted him as “Mailman Steve.”
However, somebody somewhere took notice. Postal inspectors discovered that Padgett had piled the junk mail in his garage and buried it in his yard. Then he got charged with a federal crime for delaying and destroying mail, which he plead guilty to in August.
When asked why he did it, he said that he didn’t hold onto the mail as a “personal stance” against junk mail, but because he couldn’t handle the “growing workload” while providing “personal attention” to the homes along his route.
Say what? You mean he wasn’t a hero fighting for the people he served. He was just too lazy to stick it in the box.
Well, he must have made an impact on someone, because the residents of the Apex neighborhood where he worked rallied to his defense, writing letters to the federal judge in his case saying that they didn’t miss the junk mail and commending Padgett for his “professionalism and kindness.”
Padgett avoided a possible prison term of up to five years and was given three years of federal probation, fined $3,000 and told to do 500 hours of community service.
When people hear his story, they thank him for standing up to the greedy corporate world, but his guilty conscience always gets the best him. He always tells them “what I did was illegal, what I did was wrong. It wasn’t a Robin Hood story. It wasn’t a protest.”
So as you’re tossing away your fliers for discounts on oil changes, pizza, and window replacements, don’t forget “Mailman Steve;” a lazy employee, but a neighborhood hero!!!!
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