THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503030146
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
By my calculations, if all the mail that Chesapeake people get were laid end to end, it would reach the moon in a tad more than one million weeks.
Curb your excitement and I will tell you how I reached this conclusion. Mail is handled in trays that can be measured in feet. Postal Service people tell me that Chesapeakeans receive 12,000 feet of mail each week. Figure the amount of feet between Earth and the moon and you have the kind of statistic that gives statistics a bad name.
Why I am hobnobbing with post office people is because I want to tip my hat (watch out for the glare off the bare noggin) to Earl White and Eva Ammann. They are clerks at the Great Bridge postal station, and they are first-class folks.
I go in that station a lot, and Earl and Eva deliver good cheer and good service like they were Postal Service versions of Santa and the Easter Bunny. Where they work is a kind of a cubbyhole at one corner of the Great Bridge Shopping Center. You walk in and the atmosphere is old-time country store minus the cracker barrel.
Not that Earl and Eva have their feet up and their opinions in drive gear. The two of them are behind the counter churning out non-stop service and smiles. There are by-name greetings, friendly talk and maybe even a high-beam smile for a cute kid or a new baby. But efficient business and cheerful mood are blending smoother than a mellow mint julep on Kentucky Derby day.
Just ask Hervey Trimyer. He'll tell you. Trimyer is the Postal Service customer relations guy for Norfolk and Chesapeake. He watched Earl and Eva in action the other day and sounded as happy as a wagon master watching John Wayne chase Indians over the horizon.
``They greet you with a smile, and they are really professional,'' Trimyer said about the Earl and Eva Show. ``When I came in, there was a line from the counter to the door. Three minutes later, I was at the counter.'' And Trimyer hailed the way they said ``Next.'' Like they really wanted to help, not like ``My feet hurt, and I'm tired, and what-in-heck do you want?''
Earl White is a sturdy, compact guy who's been with the Postal Service for 19 years. He signed on partly because it was a good, secure job, but also for a philosophical reason. ``The power of words, the power of the pen to affect people is amazing,'' he says. ``I wanted to be part of the process.''
Ask him how he keeps his cool when the customer line looks like it's pay day for the Chinese army and his answer is a straight-forward bit of feel-good thinking.
``I'm basically a happy person by nature,'' he says. ``Besides, if you get irate because a customer is irate, it doesn't solve the problem.''
Yes, the pace is fast so when he's off duty, he likes to sit in a hot tub and relax or work out. He likes to travel, too. And guess where he enjoys going when he's passing through a new city. Get your act together, Podunk postal workers, Earl the Expert may be in town.
Eva Ammann is a pretty, dark-haired woman who has been a Postal Service employee for nine years. Her approach to the job is to remember that each piece of mail has some business or family importance, so it's understandable that people sometimes get upset. You listen and you do the best you can to help and you hand out the smiles like free samples of sunshine.
Small station. Friendly clerks. Friendly customers. Good mix. ``The personal touch is still here,'' Eva says. ``It's always nice.''
A lot of people mutter and grumble about the U.S. Postal Service, but I am constantly amazed that the daily avalanche, with few exceptions, ends up at the right doors.
``No other business like it,'' Hervey Trimyer says. Six days a week, he figures, Postal Service people are getting the mail to as many as 550,000 customer locations in the Hampton Roads area.
Trimyer gave me a book about the history of the Postal Service, and I found out that good ol' Ben Franklin is known as the father of the operation. While he wasn't flying kites or inventing stoves, Franklin was the first postmaster general.
The booklet also told me where the great Postal Service slogan came from; the one about how ``Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.'' It's a rewrite of a line by an ancient Greek named Herodotus.
Snow, rain, heat and gloom may not stay the couriers, but I'm here to tell you ice can. Or it did in 1945. That's when I spent two days as a substitute carrier in my hometown. I slipped on a slick patch and scattered my bag of mail like it was rice at a wedding. They had to send reinforcements to re-sort the mail so Herodotus would rest easy.
Meanwhile, I retired with an embarrassed face, a sore butt and a lifelong respect for people like Earl and Eva, who do the job right. by CNB