Remember, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"? The USPS is an American institution that used to be a very successful lifetime career. Add Richard Nixon and some tight deadlines, and remove all the joy; what do you get? The Goleta postal facility shootings by Jennifer San Marco and the Edmond post office shooting by Patrick Sherrill. It's a tragically American story.
Remember, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"? The USPS is an American institution that used to be a very successful lifetime career. Add Richard Nixon and some tight deadlines, and remove all the joy; what do you get? The Goleta postal facility shootings by Jennifer San Marco and the Edmond post office shooting by Patrick Sherrill. It's a tragically American story.
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
[Music] in a matter of the people of the State of California versus orthal James Simpson case number ba09 and so my
fellow Americans ask not what your country can
do for you ask what you can do for your country and kick off the recording and
we are back on a lovely warm cool Wednesday morning no Thursday whatever
whatever day we release um hi Taylor how are you good you should be going to see
Dan Carlin later this afternoon which is going to be really exciting we can talk about it next week on Monday which no in
two it's the 21st I totally saw that on the link that I looked up on his website
and immediately forgot that information so hi it's a Thursday you're were close there you go I know it's in LA and I
know his name is Dan Carlin and you're gonna go see him so um Aces okay so
we'll go ahead and we'll go and Dive Right In I am I my top iPic is a little
bit um unusual compared to everything else because it's kind of True Crime but also kind of like social phenomenon it
kind of wrapped up into one so all right it should be it I think you'll find it
interesting I hopefully our listeners do hopefully somebody does so I am G to
cover a phrase that we kind of hear less and less these days def fight despite
the fact that this phenomenon that the phrase is based on happens a lot more often it is the phrase going postal
which I'm sure many of us are very familiar with indeed Taylor can you guess how so
let me start by saying going postal is a colloquialism we use for mass
shootings there's a reason for it that I'm going to get into and um let me start by asking Taylor if you can guess
how many mass shootings do you think we had in 2022 oh my God in America yeah of course
of course in the rest of the world four in America 300 you're so off it's not even funny
how many 636 Jesus [ __ ] Christ America [ __ ] you for context the entire
1940s had three mass shootings cool the entire 1950s had
five the entire 1960s had 13 and then we kind of pick up the pace
in the 1970s so so that's that's when we hit
33 and oh my God and then the 1980s we like you know didn't do as well we had
36 and um then we kind of started hitting this Crescendo with mass
shootings around the 1990s around 59 and then from there it just ticked up and up
and up and now every year is the most mass shootings actually what's funny is 23 funny what's what's interesting is
that 23 had like a few less mass shootings than 22 so it's one of the few years where there's like a dip in mass
shootings but whatever it just it's just going to keep going up I wonder what it could
be I joking I know exactly what it is why do you think it went down is that
what you me no no I mean I wonder why we have so many it's it's the guns that's my that's my answer it's yeah well okay
so it's it's definitely partially guns but there are of course other countries that have a ton of guns that don't have
the same social issues that we have and I think that's also a huge factor in this I think
anybody saying like I know the sole and only not not you but like anybody is saying if this issue is solved
everything is solved like I don't think that's going to be the case I'm going to get into that here in a minute because it actually touches on the whole term going postal so the vast vast majority
of we consider mass shootings are kind of like the [ __ ] you would see on cops or live PD right like it is a jilter
jilted lover shooting up like a part like a barbecue or something or an armed robbery with a single family household
that there's a shooting involved in or there's a dispute of the mall and somebody pulls out a gun and starts firing in the food court or like what
happened with the Super Bowl thing right like this now we know that that was literally just some random guy who had a
gun on him and someone looked at him the wrong way he didn't like it so he pulled his gun out so I I want to like
differentiate that because it's a key distinction like there's a key distinction between idiotic human
behavior and then calculated deliberate acts of homicide in my opinion do you
agree yeah yeah yeah okay okay like but also yeah absolutely like remember that
woman who who shot Joel ost's Church the other day right like she was like in
like very serious medical care for mental illness and got to buy a gun
right right exactly exactly so yes yes like that part of like our gun lack of
gun control is it's funny because I don't think I don't think very many
reasonable people disagree that like that is objectively insane and a story I'm going to touch on is going to be a
part of that as well um there's a demographic of shooters that kind of gave birth to the phrase that we're kind
of going into today of going postal so I'm going to be covering basically like
one or two examples of it basically the first example of it and then the most notable example of it and then talk
about like the post office in general and kind of like the place that it has in our social cont ious or the public
Consciousness and why it is now pretty much synonymous with workplace violence
yep so part of it I think has to do with the fact that almost everyone at some point in your life interacts with the
post office we all see our letter carer we all you know have to go pick up a book of stamps or we used to at least
like there's there's a connection we all have with it and so when issues with something that we're all fam with
happens we start to kind of draw associations I put the example like if
you found out that everybody who worked like the friy omatic at McDonald's was shooting people at
McDonald's like you'd be like okay there's something going on here we should dig a little bit deeper into and yeah that's what happened with the post
office so the term was initially go ahead sorry no I just wanted to tell you that there's a shipping store in my town
named going postal and I'm like that's inappropriate yeah yeah I heard about that in the middle of my research I
heard about that um but I mean it's it's it's almost like comedy now right like it's such a well-used term at this point
so the term itself isn't actually as old as you might suspect I I was kind of shocked to learn this like it was originally coined in 1993 in the St
Petersburg times and it was a Russia or Florida Florida but it was an intern
internal moniker that the post office used itself apparently in St pet
Petersburg the post office was trying to hold like a Consortium to discuss like workplace incidences and that's when the
term kind of was initially floated and then some reporter for the St Petersburg Times saw it heard it and then printed
it and then that went to the public Consciousness as a result of that
so the the first shooting at the post office didn't happen that year it just
that was just a year that this kind of the phrase kind of popped up there were a few of these shootings the 1970s and
they got like fairly minimal press attention uh and then a few in the early 1980s um but it really wasn't until 1986
that people really started being like there's something going on here and what happened was in 1986 there was a post
office in Edmond Oklahoma and a guy named Patrick shell who was a male carrier for it he walked in on August
20th and on the off the back of some poor performance reviews basically shot up the joint he walked into work with
three guns in his mailbag and started shooting his supervisors and co-workers ultimately killing 14 moving additional
six then shooting himself in the head so that was the first one in 1986 like
what what because that was the big one like that many people killed in one
setting like that was rare that that's like Coline numbers and Coline was still 10 years away or eight years away when
this happened so it really Drew people's attention to it and people started kind of paying more and more attention to it
there was another shooting that happened this was later on and I'm going to kind of touch on this one to show that like
this is not like an issue that happened in 1986 then went away this happened in 20 2006 so there's a
woman named Jennifer St Marco um she was uh born in 1961 and she lived in California and for
whatever reason she has held every random odd federal job there was she was like she worked for a state prison she
worked for the police department she was a lunch lady for a school and eventually her last career move was working at a
post office technically it was a male sorting facility so it's like a warehouse building but it was it was a
post office essentially so she held that job for about six years and around 2 uh the year
2000 her behavior started changing in ways that resulted in her being reported
by her co-workers to her higher ups specifically a guy named Dexter Shannon overheard her making some crude remarks
about somebody that they both knew that had committed suicide as a result Dexter had seen a bunch of different behavior
from her and reported her to the supervisors and that resulted in Shannon
getting a report saying that she has to report to the supervisor's office to discuss her behavior she apparently lost
her [ __ ] to the point where the supervisor had to call the police to come calm her down and during that
incident they ended up having to put her under under arrest wow she was subject
to a 72-hour involuntary hold by a psychologist who evaluated her to figure out what is going on with her but after
72 hours they're like well we can't definitively say she's a danger to herself or others so they released her
from that hold so again systems people falling into the system systems breaking apart Systems Failing that's all kind of
wrapped up into this which we're going to get into in depth here in a moment around what the background of all this
was in January of 2006 she did something absolutely insane she drove from golita
California down to Los Angeles to her former apartment it was an 8818 Mile Drive that she made just so she could go
to the old apartment building she lived in to kill one of her former neighbors it was a woman named Beverly what was it
Beverly Johnson I wrote her name down no Beverly Graham she found this woman shot
her in the head killed her and then hopped right back in her car and started driving right back to golita like she
was gone she was far gone she goes back to her former office and at that point
she had just been released from this involuntary hold and as a result of that hold the post office her employer had
removed or revoked her credentials her key car so she technically shouldn't be able to get in anyways but she got far
enough to the parking lot to where she saw a former coworker point a gun at his head to give me your key card the kid
did it and then he ran off oh my God she ends up getting access the facility finding her supervisors and shooting
seven of her supervisors killing them um as well as co-workers before turning the
gut on herself and then shooting herself in the head a lot of weird things that happened up to that point that technically aren't well sort of aren't
illegal but they were if she had people in her life then they would have probably got ahead of this
had a habit of going to grocery stores and convenience stores and buying stuff and then throwing the stuff along with
the receipt away right outside in the garbage can outside the store which is kind of weird people notice for doing this so weird there's like so
like a million years ago I was listening to my favorite murderer and there's a
woman who killed her husband and please someone tell me who this was because I can't remember exactly the details but
one thing that she was doing is she was washing their clothes but not drying them and folding them and putting them wet in the drawers
and just like so it's just like something like that that just feels like wait what screw loose right like a
screw like something is wrong because like what are you doing is so weird Taylor I've had like my mind so
preoccupied with work things lately tonight when I went to yoga I like put my stuff in the the cupboards the locker
room and all that and then I walked in and I started laying my mat down I realized I'm still still wearing shoes and I was like oh my God if anybody's
paying attention I look insane that could be worse it's true okay fine fine fine I just
want to let you know that you're you're okay first thank you thank you um some other things she would do is that she
tried to go out and register a business um in golita called the racist press to
share her opinions on minorities um which she was prevented from
doing wow that's we took a weird turn we took a weird very bold right right um
she somehow claimed that the federal government was trying to mind control her and the rest of the population Through The Rocky Horror Picture Show
which kind of sounds like drag people reading to kids today
exactly like we eventually came full circle um that's silly she was found
walking around a strip mall talking to herself rather frequently at one point the gas station near her house that she would often go to at one point she
stripped nude in front of customers and the owner who knew her just like kind of helped her out and was like we should
I'm not going to call the cops we should just get you out of here um so she was having a rough rough time and nobody
really was able to point it out but getting into kind of like the logic behind it it's actually really
interesting and like kind of it's kind of like a microcosm of what
we were discussing on the last episode where you brought up the fact that a Year's tuition in Columbia cost $200 and
now it's like I don't even know what you said like tens of thousands of dollars it's $66,000 yeah but but adjusted for
inflation it should only be 3,000 right that's what you said yeah exactly it just has to do with like how econ the
economy works these days which is kind of like it's all suppositions because you can never totally understand what's
going on with people that do stuff like this there's a book by a guy named Stephen muso called Beyond going postal
and Stephen was a former post office worker he was a post office worker he was a lifer he ended up moving on to I
forgot the name of the exact Department within the post office that he moved on to but it had something to do with like
managing it's like HR stuff like how to improve people's life life there and work life and all that stuff um his
research pointed the fact that 133% of all worker onw worker violence
was committed at the post office in the 1980s even though the workforce of post
office workers was 0.75% so it had like a 15
16x um higher rate of work workplace violence than any other uh workplace
environment out there in the 1980s why tell me tell me why so his research
points to several things one is that workplace satisfaction was unusually low
amongst postal workers compared to any other profession that was out there but it also had a to do with the post office
as a branch of the government versus a branch of private Enterprise so one
thing to note is that in the 1970s I look this up the average salary of a household was
$7,600 by that Spectrum just to get a sense teachers were getting paid 11,600 doctors were very high paid at
$53,000 by comparison salaries at the post office was about 40% over the national average of
$13,500 outpacing weight wages of other workers so it was entirely conceivable
to not be college educated not be well read well versed
well anything come out of high school you work for 30 40 years at the post office
you would earn more than the national average as a medium income and it was at
that time enough for you to buy a single family home uh two cars you know uh
vacations with the family and the kids every summer do like have a very reasonable normal life and retire with a
pension like with a pension plan with a 401k like all the benefits that come from you know life at at that in that
era so what happened was that in the 19
in 1970 like sorry just back up real quick the US Post Office was a federal agent
up until 1970 so in up until 1970 it was like what we discussed a long time ago
around air traffic controllers how that was part of the federal government like you cannot unionize and you cannot
strike as part of the federal government that's just part of the fun like imagine if the air the Air Force sides are GNA
go on strike and it's like we're War right we're all gonna die you can't do it um and so that was a situation here
and what happened was that there was complaint about working conditions and
all that stuff and so what happened was that there was an 8-day strike in 1970 that happened and Nixon technically was
as president of the United States was the end of the line with negotiations on
this and so he ended up approving a bunch of things approving a bunch of pay raises and all that stuff but he also
said look y'all went on strike it's illegal for you to go on strike we're going to change this and he passed
What's called the postal reorganization act and what that did was now we're going to do is say if y'all want to act
like a private Enterprise we're just going to make you private Enterprise so you're no longer a part of the federal government you can compete out there in
the open market and on top of that you will no longer have Monopoly on mail delivery which is what gave rise to the
birth of us um UPS right I was gonna ask when you say that like it does make
sense that they would be like only we can do this until you can't and the I have all the other things and can I tell you how annoying it is cuz like we were
turning something and had to go to like six to get a FedEx person that would take it yeah yeah great yeah but so as
part of that it means that they had to start keeping track with um the regular
economy which I look this up the expectations on pay raises for US postal
postal service it's it's not totally even but it was somewhere around the 20%
pay raise every five years give or take so it was very very predictable that
like people who joined the post office in like the 1960s and like at the very beginning of the 70s or I mean even up
to like the mid to late 70s this all started happening in like the 80s really so they expected a certain standard of
living they were like hey I was I hate to put it this way I was like I deserve better like I was promised this life why
can't I have this life and all of it is boils down to this postal reorganization act because what ended up happening was
that the whip started kind of cracking on supervisors saying hey we have to be
very deliberate and very diligent about the way we're delivering message packages and and the mail and it took
away all autonomy and structure it was like you have to hit this many homes on
this day starting at this time you know it was very structur it became like a business it came like a business and
they became accountable to like Market forces and also because of that they weren't able to get the same amount of
pay raises were accustomed to so all of a sudden the standard of living of somebody who worked for the Post Office
dropped compared to the rest of America because you have this giant agency that
was now dedicated to paying out pensions and all this stuff to people who had retired
forever ago and FedEx didn't have that UPS didn't have that they didn't have the overhead that these guys had to deal so like it kind of was forced of being a
failed entity by virtue of this reorganization act and so that's part of
the reason why people think that the post office has this thing is because all these adults who came into the
workforce had this understanding of this is what my life is going to be like they join and realize that hey I have no
leeway in my work workflow like can you imagine I tell can you imagine like you
have to be at work at 7 a. every day on the dot dresses way and you have to pick
this up at this time and every single house you have to hit has to be hit within this time window so you can get back here exactly at 5:00 clock out like
no in the middle of recording this podcast I started watching the gor vll video like it's like it's crazy I know I
can't like I have my friend one of my friends in New York is a school counselor and she's she was a teacher
for a long time and we were talking about our jobs and she was like wait you can do whatever you want and I'm like well yeah like my job is to like you
know I do stuff and I plan things but like I don't have a schedule that's like that you know and like a teach does a
teacher has a schedule that's like you have to do this right now and this right now and this right now and my schedule is more like I make it if I can't do
something I can say no you know like yeah I feel very lucky that that I don't
people thrive like that but for me I'm like that's not for me I like to have this flexibility that was one takeaway from this research was that above pay
above status symbols or whatever else people crave autonomy like if you take
away complete autonomy and in control over someone they lash out and act out
in ways like you're trying to like do something to me like it actually like is a pretty good like justification for why
people choose to be like managers like being managers [ __ ] sucks like it's like a horrible job like you're accountable Dependable the people and
like everybody else like get the pay usually isn't that great like but you want the autonomy over your life and
that's what they with this person what was his name I forgot his name already um Stephen musuka
was saying be ongoing postal was like that's why the post like the post office was forced into a market
condition way after the time when it could compete with those market conditions and the pressure from above
came down on the workers in a way that nobody no other Workforce experienced and that's the reason why there's also
rumors that this thing called a zmt machine called a zip machine translator or the letter male sorter is also a reason why they would go nuts but I
don't know it's all speculation wait why do the mail order make them crazy because it's a because it's a fast
moving repetitious action of like zip code this go here zip code this here like it is people aren't robots and if
you make them act like robots it's going to drive them insane and I can't think of a worst like I mean the
DMV the IRS office the post office like I can't think of a more more depressing
places to work it's just a gray existence it's so I don't know I couldn't do I went to so the two best
things about living in a small town are the DMV and the post office because you don't have to wait in line so you just
like the DMV you can just go in and out post office is over anyone there what time I went to the post office there were no cars in the front and I walked
in and there was no one there in like anything and there was like a bell and I rang the bell and the lady like came from the back and she was like hi and I
was like are you okay I was like blink twice if you're like being robbed because there was like nobody there and
she was like oh no I'm just hanging out it's fine it's lovely okay that yeah but we used to live in LA and I would go to
the post office every now in LA and I was like dude [ __ ] this place like exactly no it's lovely in a small town
and it is rough everywhere else yeah yeah so but yeah that's the story
there's so many stats on this I I I pulled together a spreadsheet of all the postal shootings what I wanted to was
feed that through Chad gbt and have it run a graph or create a graph of like
all shootings mixed with like postal shootings because like I said like when we think of mass shootings like so much
of our thoughts go directly to like somebody opening fire at a festival or
like a movie theater but it's just not that like it's just not that is the vast majority is like an
idiot got into a fight because someone looked at his girl's butt right like and then pulled a gun like that's
it right exactly exactly so um but these these are a weird anomaly and they're
not slowing down the latest one was in 202 too um wow so yeah it's still going
on it's still a thing and the good news is that I read this hilarious thing where the post office put together a
research um group on postal shootings and what they said was that a postal worker is no more likely to get shot
than a convenience store worker or a taxi driver and most dangerous jobs but
but but no what was funny was like researchers like those people get shot by people who are robbing them by other
people they don't get shot by store employees so oh my God
totally um yeah that's crazy that's really sad that that like job that is so important
I I love mail miles just like wrote a bunch of letters I'll mail you one it says will you be my friend I'll mail you one they're real cute but I love sending
mail to people I love getting the mail um it's really important and um it bums
me out when people are like you know I've seen people in like the government be like well the G service hasn't made
any money you're like it's a service it's not supposed to make money you know it's a service people no it does though
that's the thing after the reorganization ACT they were like you if you're going to act like a private Enterprise you have we're going to make
you a private Enterprise so that's the issue the issue is they actually do have to make money
now but before was a part of the government agency and they didn't it was all taxpayer funded but
oh but there there's been a lot of like interesting takes on the post office like one of them was that post offices
are in a lot of places where Banks aren't and one way to help people out who are less advantaged is to put some
sort of banking capabilities within the perview of post offices or I know they
do money orders and we've talked about like unbanked places before as well or like another example I mean this these
are all terrible like another example was food deserts because like a lot of places like also don't have access to
good healthy food andely but how would you I mean no this this is one of those
things where it feels like either it needs to get put back into under government control or it needs to just
revamp itself in a way that it's not so Soul crushing to people you know I feel
it's a little bit of both and like also like it reminds me okay have you seen that terrible movie with Kevin ker the
postman no I haven't but heard a lot about it it is not as bad as Amelia but
really bad and I I think I think remember when it ended I like yeah I was so mad it's like you know four hours of
my life and the ending I was like this is so stupid I'm so mad but he becomes a postman and I think the premise is like
it's the apocalypse and he finds this postman's uniform in like a mail truck
but it's like on like a medical skeleton like they didn't even try you know and he like takes it off and like wears it and he like he like accidentally becomes
the one who delivers letters and people really need that and that also happened in the San Francisco Fire that we just
talked about because once the mail started going people were so relieved you know people just like needed that
communication to their friends and family they needed to be able to tell people that they were okay like it's something that like such an essential
service yeah is it still essential yes I love it please mail me
something I don't even know how you use a mail I'll be honest with you I don't use post office I know you do I know you
do because you've literally sent me more things in the 15 years I've known you than anybody in my entire life has ever
me true I M People things all the time I was talking to my friend Julia remember that state um remember you know the
state that comedy group no they have I'll sent you they have a thing where it's like the mailman doesn't DM he puts
tacos in everybody's mailboxes and everybody's like listen to man like I love the tacos but I also like need to
pay my bills and it's just so funny and I mail my friend Julia a taco like not a real one but like a picture of a taco
one time it just I love it I'm going to mail you something today Taylor I I'll be honest with you I don't know how stamps work and so as a result I
literally only use FedEx because I go to FedEx and I say I need to send this somewhere what do I do with it and like
here's a package and I what do I do now it's like put the address here put the address here and they give like right
cool and I have like a book of stamps I don't know why I bought this I don't know what the of it is anyways um that
is I know little bit of a light story it's been a long week for me and a long weekend so apologies no but that's
interesting and they definitely shouldn't have named that story here going postal and um that's sad you
should be safe at work especially with a job that's not dangerous you know like you know if you are a pilot on a stunt
pilot you know fine but if you are you know a post office worker that
sucks and I'm sorry to hear that about them yeah yeah but I mean again your
Postman is not going to start shooting into your house like they're only going to kill their own so like you're safe
yeah yeah yeah yeah I went out last week to check a mailbox and then the mail lady was coming up the street in her
truck and I was embarrassed cuzz I was at the mailbox already and then we both laughed and then she handed me myself a
that's fun I always wave my post post person I'm like I'm like man thanks for getting in that hot car and just driving
around with the door open like I leave them water sometimes like in the summer I'll put like freeze water in the freeze
and I'll put it in the mailbox so that by the time they get it it's still cold um cuz it's just like 115 and you're as
as you said there's no door no window you're so thoughtful I know um so yeah that's our story this
week um Taylor thank you for indulging my fers curiosity on postal shootings
thank you I will um yeah I will if anyone has any other ideas for us we at Doom tood gmail.com at all the socials
at Doom toil pod um and we will be back next week with more women's history
stuff for me and you know whatever who knows who knows from what what for me awesome thanks
thanks