the first night... or was it morning?

the first night was a psychological breaking experiment. it was designed i'm sure to weed out the weak and only train the strongest among us that the usps was only going to accept the sharpest of candidates for the back breaking and mind reducing work it had in mind. we were to report at midnight the next monday... this was a thursday that we were told this. waitaminute someone picked up on this... was this sunday night or monday that we to be there. in other words, were we to be there on sunday night 11.59pm to be there at 12am monday or did the trainer misspeak and intend it to mean 11.59pm monday and therefore we would be working into tuesday early morning? the trainer was a little bit thrown. oh, monday she said. she was a middle aged middle management woman who would not be there to train us, that was to be left to others. she wasn't used to letting her mind do mental flip flops while it is working third shift in order to make sense of the scheduling while you were still a naturally born diurnal animal. monday, she said. we repeated the question, still unsure. she said monday, still not sure of what we were trying to figure out. oh well, i left with the rest of our small training class of potential sleepwalkers figuring that we were to come in sunday night. enjoy your weekend she called after us.
sunday night came and after a day spent trying to sleep unsuccessfully, i stumbled in and announced myself to the heavy set man sitting at a desk playing computer solitaire on his laptop that i was here for the training session. he looked at me suspiciously, but admitted me with the sight of my new training badge. he was, after all, on the job earning a hard earned usps pension. there must have been something alot more crafty about him that wasn't given away by his poker-faced appearance for he was accepted by the order of the blue eagle and allowed to drink coffee from his poker hand vending machine while dressed in a t-shirt and blue jeans keeping the nations mail safe froma variety of nefarious midnight intruders. at least when he decided to pull his attention away from the solitaire hand.
we met again in the same room that we had last sat in, what was it two or three days ago? i tried to figure it out. was this considered another whole day even though it had only officially begun a minute or two ago? i wasn't sure, but then noone was. we sat uneasily saying our heys and hellos, trying not look as tired as we were feeling, not wanting to be the first to yawn first.
at last, our trainers came into the room. they were a young olive complectioned man named tony and a middle aged woman named beverly who looked as though she had drank far too many cups of coffee at hours of the night that most people were asleep. they were a team who worked in the main sorting floor on a machine called the DBCS. the delivery bar code sorter for short. to a postal service worker and member of the order, everything is explained in short by acronyms. it makes everything seem to make sense in a crazy mixed up world where you are bombarded by several thousands of pieces of mail hourly.
for the rest of the night, tony and beverly expertly set us up with hours of video tapes to keep us company while they went back to their machine and got some real work done. we received large white binders filled with oodles and oodles of photocopies that some hard worker put alot of time and effort into photocopying directly from 20 year old training books. we received the best training that government administered agency could supply in 1984. we were bombarded with videos on the history and origin of that unique morse code that is the usps's zip code, postal regulations, how to run the DBCS, clean it and take care of it if you were left on a desert island alone with the behemoth. i knew that many in my training class were falling prey to the very real temptation of sleeping at a quarter to 4 in the morning in a darkened room with the soft buzz of the tape hissing in the VCR, but i was alert to the very watchful eyes that were undoubtedly watching us from the corners of the blue eagle's aptitude police. i was set in my mind to pas this test and not fall asleep at some critical juncture and miss how to properly determine the difference in canceling a first class flat and a flat of media mail.
then the final tape. it was perhaps the most important one of all for it starred the then, huge hollywood star that was edward james olmos of 'miami vice' fame. how they landed him was beyond me, but you could be sure that olmos resplendent in his pastel suit and 1/4" thin skinny tie was in his element. part actor, part order of the blue eagle spokesman and part cop to be sure, he whispered the strong threat that working for the usps was a serious business and that the usps took it seriously too. he informed us that the usps had a strong arm postal police that would be watching us, was watching us now and guarded the public from the evil doings of thieves, rule breakers and sluggards on a daily basis. they were everywhere and to set an example, he gave us several. there was the lesson of the PDC employee who broke into little kids birthday cards to steal the 5 bucks from grandma who was caught and dragged away in front of his co-workers one day by two strong armed men in inexpensive suits and sunglasses and was now facing 20 years hard federal time. there was the rural carrier who was throwing away 'junk' mail (as if there IS any such thing!) rather than delivering it and there was the man who was fired after slacking off and now his family were blacklisted from the usps, its good pension and the respect of thousands of his fellow postal employees. lt. castillo urged his to inform our superiors of anything that we saw that was suspicious and not above the boards. if we did so, we earned theirs and the public's respect, not mention saving the usps an example of 20 thousand dollars just by identifying a malfunctioning mail sorting machine. it was a win/win situation for us and we exhorted to follow his example. how could we not, knowing that even twenty years ago, the usps was saving money up for the next big thing. they didn't even have to update their promotional videos. they were timeless and obviously appropriate for anyone at anytime.