Stuff You Should Know - Why Postal Employees Go Postal

Episode Date: January 21, 2020

1993 was known as the peak of a disturbing trend in America: post office shootings, carried out by postal workers. A stunned country looked for answers and turned up a toxic workplace that seemed to be driving some workers past their breaking point. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Oh, boy, this can be a long year. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry over there.

And this is Step You Should Know 2020. What do you mean long year? The year is always the same length. I almost forgot the word podcast in the intro. That's an indicator, it's gonna be a long year. We're only gonna do this. Subjectively. We're only gonna do this a hundred more times this year. 102.

Yeah, but we just did one. And now this one. 103. So a hundred more, oh, 101 more? I think we do 104 a year. Do we? Jerry, yeah, cause it's 52 weeks times two. 104. Oh, that's what I meant.

So we've done one. I was just joking by the way, when I said Jerry. 102 more. She looks mad. That's what I'm saying, long year, buddy. Jerry's got on her principal shoes. She does. Josh just made Jerry walk up and down the hall

so I could hear the clip clop of her, of her wooden heel. And it definitely made me like, I had a little PTSD of like, oh boy, someone's coming after us. It sounded like the principal was coming and we were in the office. We were smoking in the boys' room, which I never did. I never did either, man.

Even when I was a high school smoker, I was like, are you out of your mind? You smoked in the lobby. In the, I'd like escape, you know, campus to smoke or whatever. Was there a smoking section at your school? No, no, I wasn't that, what am I, like your age? I don't think there was by the time I got there either,

but I definitely remember maybe the first year or so, but I definitely remember when my sister was at my high school. She's six years older, there was a smoking area by the dumpster and like, that's where they had it roped off where students could go smoke. Isn't that crazy?

It's awesome. They're like, hey, we know it's a long day. If you need to go, if you need to go light up, just do it over here. That's the official place. If you need to go cool it up. It's so funny. Some cools or go feel alive with pleasure.

I think that's Newport. Yeah, I think so. I did smoke on a plane a couple of times. I was on one flight that I remember that had smoking and international flight. And it was like, it's crazy. Yeah, there's no barrier, no partition, no nothing. It's just, these are the rows that you can sit in and smoke.

Which is all based, the whole plane is a smoking section at that point. Yeah, it is crazy. It's always funny when I see movies where people are smoking on buses and in planes and restaurants and it's really different time, different day, different era. Speaking of a different time,

I guess it qualifies as a different time. I think today, Chuck, that we should talk about the era when people went postal. That's right. And I'm looking at something up relevant, by the way. I'm not just checking my email right now. Oh, well, I'll tap dance for us then. Well, I was just curious if there was a band

called Going Postal, not if, but how many there were. Sure. And I just typed in Going Postal Band and I see quite a few Facebook pages called Going Postal Band Twitter accounts. Yeah. And also different ones. Going Postal, some with an N with a little apostrophe.

Going Postal. Sure. Those are the little more loosey-goosey, like Jimmy Buffett style. Like Yacht Rocky. Yeah, so, yeah, of course people would take something horrific, like workplace shootings and turn it into a band name.

Dude, not only a band name, there's a franchise of mail centers, like where you get your mail sent to called Going Postal. It's where it got nationwide franchise. Interesting. Any article that you read about the post office, it'll be called like Going Postal. Like it's completely been co-opted and removed

from its context. So much so that I would guess our younger listeners aren't fully aware of where that whole thing comes from. Yeah, and I think not that it's cool and acceptable, but I think the reason it's even allowed to happen to name things this now is because we are now in an era where that term, as we'll learn in this podcast, and we've talked about the golden age of skyjacking

and the golden age of this and that. Dissentary. There was a weird golden age of postal workers shooting up their workplaces. Yeah. It hasn't happened that much since then. And so that's what I think has allowed people to be like, hey, good band name, huh?

So I think that- Because no one would call a band school shooter now. No. You know, because that's the active, horrific thing going on. But it's the same thing and you could make a really good argument or case that it grew out of the postal shootings.

Absolutely, sure. These were the first workplace mass shootings that America was exposed to. And I would put to you, not that people don't shoot up post offices any longer, but that when it does happen, it is no longer even remotely as newsworthy as it once was. Because at the beginning,

we didn't understand what the heck was going on. Now, we understand firsthand, all of us, anybody who has a job in America, now understands what's going on. And it's also spread from beyond the post office into offices around the country, businesses around the country, and even into schools. Churches.

People. You name it. Yeah. Some people make the argument that neoliberalism is to blame. And I'm okay with that. And we'll explore that more later. Yeah, I know neoliberalism.

Did you like them trying new things in 2020? It was good. All right. Did you practice your delivery or? All right. Well done. I nailed it, I think. I think so too.

I know that that podcast is looming on neoliberalism. Yeah. It's long been on your list. Yeah. So just a matter of getting around to it. I don't know how objective we'll be. Maybe. 2021?

Maybe. How about five years from now? Sure. All right. Within the next five years, let's say that. If we are still blessed enough to be doing this job. You keep saying that, because apparently every time you do,

10 years passes and everybody's like, aren't, can you believe that you even said that? So just keep saying that, because I want to keep doing this. I think it's kind of neat to think about like, having a 20 plus year partnership. Yeah. Like there might be a podcasting Hall of Fame one day.

We can go visit it. Sure. Yeah, exactly. Look at Mark Maron and Karen and Georgia. Yeah. Maybe they'll give us a senior discount. All right. So we should talk about,

and did you write this one actually? No, Dave Roos did. Oh man, he did a great job. Yeah, he did. And the way he put together the story, I think works well. We're going to follow this format. Why not?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's right. That's my mantra in 2020. And how long are you going to do that? It's like January, I gotta do it all this month. So he starts off with a story of a man named Patrick Henry Sherrill, 44 year old man in Oklahoma City.

His known in his neighborhood as Crazy Pat. Yeah. He was a big dude. He was a loner. He had a lot of, he ticked a lot of boxes when it comes to mass shootings. He was basically like Pyle from Full Metal Jacket when he was in the mood it sounds like.

Yeah. He was a loner. He'd been caught as a peeping Tom. He hurt animals. He would tie cats and dogs to fences with bailing wire. Not nice. Not nice at all. He was shy.

He was awkward. Didn't have a lot of friends. He joined the Marine Corps, which is where he learned how to shoot. Cue private Pyle once again. Right. And then after the Marines, he moved in with his mom.

And when she died in 1978, he was alone with his ham radio. Don't want to throw any shade at the hams out there. No, because remember we found out in our episode on ham radios that like they are the most courteous. That's right. Like civic minded people around. Yeah.

So this is a bad apple. Right, right. He doesn't exemplify the ham radio community. And I didn't even want to mention that. But the idea of him alone with his ham radio bears mentioning it. You can obfuscate the truth Chuck. He's got to bring it out, address it,

and then, you know, keep going. In 84. That's the mantra in 2020. In 84, he enlisted in the National Guard of Oklahoma. And in 1985, he started work as, you know what? A postal carrier in Edmond, Oklahoma. Right. So he by all accounts was a,

I don't know if disturbed is the right word, but maybe it is. Certainly a less balanced individual than probably the average person for sure. So when he was told that he was going to be fired if he didn't shape up, he wasn't super great at his job. No, he wasn't.

According to his supervisors, he would deliver mail the wrong address. He would be late to work a lot. And he was given a notice like you're gonna be fired if you don't start doing what we want you to. That's right. The next day he showed up to work and without saying a word,

this is what makes this one so creepy. He went to his supervisor, he went to find the postmaster and he shot them without saying a word. And he started moving around his workplace at this Edmond, Oklahoma post office. And within 15 minutes, had killed 15 people, including himself.

Yeah, side note, one of those people was the grandson of Notre Dame football coach, Newt Rockney. People were locking themselves in vaults. They survived. So he didn't kill everyone in the office. Which you might be asking, why does a post office have a vault stamps?

Yeah. They really care about those stamps. They do. Valuable. They are. Go ahead. They're fighting in offices and under their desks. And by the time the SWAT team gets there,

they find him dead at his desk. He went to his desk and killed himself. Right. So 15 minutes killed 15 people, including himself. And did it without saying a word from what all people are saying. Yeah. And this was one of the bloodiest events

in American history, mass shootings at the time. There were a couple before this, but this was pretty early on in mass shootings. Yeah, America had not really been fully acquainted with mass shootings yet. They were so rare. So rare that there were huge, huge, huge stories. And they also seemed like total anomalies,

not the very beginnings of a pattern that was starting to emerge. That's not what people thought of these things at the time. You couldn't, if you go back and watch Dan Rather reporting on this, he can't make heads or tails of it. It's just the most senseless thing. That's what they use, senseless, nonsensical, insensible.

Like they just couldn't understand it. Yeah, the one, of course, the famous 66 clock tower sniper at the University of Texas. Have you ever seen that documentary on that? No. It's done in like the animation. Oh, wow.

We've done it through the animation software like in Waking Life. Wow. And somehow it makes it even more disturbing. I have not seen that, but I'm gonna see it. Because this stuff fascinates me. The 84 one, I don't know if we should ever cover that one. I don't know either.

The one at McDonald's in California was just horrific. Yeah. And the difference between that one and most of these take place over, it always seems like it's like six minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes. The one at the McDonald's was 77 minutes. Yeah.

Of just bloodshed and shooting. Yeah. It was awful. Yeah, it was. But they were still anomalies. They were anomalies. And this was the first one that took place in an office. The New York Daily News said,

Cheryl put a new wrinkle to this kind of violence. He brought it into the office. Right. So he was not the first postal carrier to come to his workplace and shoot up the place. No. Right? He targeted like the back office.

But there had been a couple before. I saw it even going back into the 70s where postal workers had come to work and shot the place up. Usually targeting a supervisor. Yeah. And it was never this many people, I think was one of the big differences.

That's a huge difference. Yeah. The one in South Carolina, 83, I think was just one person killed with a 12 gauge. The postmaster barricaded himself in a storage room. Ironically of a convenience store, you'll see why later. So just put a pin in that,

but was actually killed in the convenience store across the street. Yeah. And actually it wasn't just him. There were other people barricaded in that convenience store storage room with him, but he was the only one he shot. Right.

And that's a pattern that started to emerge as the more people started looking into these things, the more they were like, a lot of these are, they're not random. Right. These guys let people live that they could have easily killed. And they went out of their way to find people

who they did kill or tried to kill. And a lot of times it would be their supervisor or the postmaster, somebody who was in charge of bossing them around or possibly a coworker who had, you know, gotten a promotion instead of them. Yeah, that happened specifically in one case. And another guy was stalking a coworker

and he came to work. And I think he didn't end up killing her. Is that right? No, he killed a male employer. Yeah, she went there. Killed a male employee instead. So by the time this 1986 Edmunds, Oklahoma, a lot of people will point to that as like,

that's not the first postal shooting. Right. This is the one that really started to catch everybody's attention. Yeah, from 86 to 99, there were 15 different incidences or incidents that involved. Colonialists. Which you were right by the way.

I know, but it's just a mouthful. That involved current or former postal workers killing coworkers, 34 people over a 13 year period. Which included that 14 in Oklahoma. Yeah. A lot of people point to 1993 as the peak of the going postal era. Not even necessarily because of all the bloodshed that year.

I mean, there were some in 93, but more just the way that it leached into the cultural consciousness by that time. I think 93 was when it first appeared in print too, right? 93 was when it appeared in print in the St. Petersburg, Florida times. And ironically, they were talking about a symposium on workplace violence that was sponsored

by the United States Postal Service. And the article says, which is seen, the US Postal Service has seen so many outbursts that in some circles, excessive stress is known as going postal. This is 93. That same year, Seinfeld debuted, I think they debuted Newman as a character.

And they basically said, he's a postal worker and referenced postal workers going crazy. Should we do the scene? Sure. Who would you like to be? I'll be Newman. Oh, okay. Who are you?

I gotta be George then. Okay, I mean, you had to tell the people is what I mean. Oh, oh, I see. Yeah. I thought you were presenting me with a fake choice. No. This is George. Let me ask you something.

What do you do for a living, Newman? That's my George. I'm a United States postal worker. Aren't those the guys that always go crazy and come back with a gun and shoot everybody? Sometimes. Nice. I remember that scene.

That's why I went and looked at it. There's actually more to it. Yeah. Could they ask him why? And Newman actually explains it. And there's actually a lot of water to his explanation, it'll turn out. He says.

Oh, the mail never stops. The mail never stops. That's right. It's always coming. It's always, and then the publisher's clearing house week or something like that. He's like, they have to snap him out of this tirade that he goes on.

But it's actually supposedly part of what was responsible for this phenomenon is the ceaseless pressure to constantly move the mail as fast as possible. I've been watching Seinfeld a lot lately. Yeah? Yeah. What do you think? It's great.

It holds up pretty well, huh? It holds up pretty well. And it's funny to hear Larry David, because this was before I knew, I knew he created Seinfeld, but it was before Kerb, so I didn't know what he looked like or sounded like. And he uses his voice a lot. Like he's the voice of Steinbrenner.

Steinbrenner, sure. And there's a couple of other things, like there'll just be a random off-screen line and it's Larry David. And now watching it, it just cracks me up. It's great. But yeah, it holds up pretty well. Obviously, some of it, we're in different times now.

Some of it's kind of untoward, but not too bad. Okay. I'll just say that. Yeah, it was the 90s. No, I know it was a different era. Different era. And that was even the emergence of the PC era. But compared to today, it's like,

you can't see that kind of stuff. Should we take a break or you got... I got one more cultural reference. There was a Simpsons, and I don't know what year it came out, but I'll bet it was around 93, where Flanders and Homer become like best friends because Flanders takes Homer to a football game. And Flanders learns that he can't stand Homer

and doesn't like to be around him. And he has a dream where he climbs a clock tower with a gun and starts shooting at everybody. It's like, there's Homer, there's another Homer, there's Homer, and one of the people he shoots at is a postal carrier who drops his mail bag and produces like an assault rifle and starts shooting back.

And it's just the most casual thing that requires zero explanation whatsoever, because by this time, everyone knew going postal. Mail carriers, they're not just like some friendly guy who gets chased off by a dog every once in a while. It's the worst thing that happens. This guy is like on the verge of cracking and killing everybody.

And he comes to my house every day, like what is going on? And this is 1993 when that kind of started to really rise to the surface, that question. Yeah, and like you hinted at, I'm glad you picked this because it's there, as it turns out, there is something to it. It wasn't just coincidence.

And we'll talk a little bit more about that in other cases right after this. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit more detail. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["I Heart Radio App"]

All right. So like we said, most of these killings occurred roughly over 86 to about 97, but they date back to 83 in as late as 2006. One, another big famous one was 1991, Thomas McElvane, he was in Michigan. Yeah, in Royal Oak, Michigan, just above Detroit. Yeah, this guy was a martial arts enthusiast,

and he was in the Marine Corps as well, and he was discharged dishonorably for running over a car with a tank. Okay, so I was watching a... I read that as cat, by the way, the first three times I read this. Running over a cat with a tank? Yeah, and I was like, oh my God, but it was a car.

Gladly discharged him. Not as bad. No. Unless there was a cat in the car. Toons was just driving. Toons is new about going on postal. So there's a documentary out there called Murder by Proxy, How America Went Postal,

and they go to great lengths to basically say, Thomas McElvane was not totally off his rocker. Like, he was considered by his coworkers still today. People who were there when he came and shot up the place. Victims of his shooting. Still, some of them will say, I don't condone what he did, but I totally understand it. Right.

Did he see his treatment? Yes, because he was treated so poorly by the management and so aggressively poorly and hostily that they basically said like, this was just a powder keg waiting to happen. And when they heard that this was going on, they didn't know who it was. They said like, we didn't just think I was Tom McElvane.

Right. They said it could have been any one of us. Because this was so toxic there. So yes, it's easy to characterize him as a wing nut because he shot up his post office and killed a bunch of people. But there are other people who were there who say that's not a full picture of who he was.

Yeah, I mean, if there's a situation where there is a workplace shooting and a hundred percent of the people don't go, oh, well, it was this guy, then it might bear looking into the workplace environment. Again, not condoning in any way at all, but it's just interesting to think about. And once we see the reports that came out later,

like I said, there is some weight to some of this stuff. 93, I mean, McElvane, I guess we should say, in six minutes killed four people, wounded four others, killed himself. He bled off a hundred rounds of shells. Yeah, in six minutes. I can't imagine what that must have been like. Dude, that McDonald's guy had an oozy.

Oh, I know, there are very few people that I hate, but I hate that man, hate him. Yeah, it was. He was a despicable human being. Yeah, so 93 was, and I remember this actually, there were two post office shootings on the same day in 93. I remember I was in college at the time, and it was in the middle of the going postal era,

all the headlines, and I remember two of them happened on the same day, and it was almost, I mean, it was horrific, but it was almost like this weird. Like you got to be kidding me. Yeah, exactly, and you know, this was back pre-widespread internet even, and it was still like a big deal on campus, everyone talking about it.

Sure, yeah, I can imagine. Because I think it confirmed this general suspicion that had been confirmed officially, that there's something going on, and there's something to this going postal thing. Yeah, and one of them was not a mail carrier, and one of them was a mechanic. Right.

And another that was passed over for a promotion, killed two people, wounded two others. Yeah, his name was Larry Jason. And this is the one who killed the woman who got his job. No, he went after the woman, oh no, no, no, you're right, I'm sorry. I think he wounded her, I don't know if he killed her. Oh yeah, wounded two people, yeah,

including supervisor and the woman who had a job. He killed two people, and then wounded two others. And then the other guy was Mark Hilburn in California. He killed his mother and her home before going to the post office, and he's the one that was looking for a woman that he was stalking. She wasn't there, so he killed someone else.

Right, he was, that's actually kind of an atypical case that you could make a case, doesn't necessarily qualify as going postal. Because he wasn't disgruntled by being mistreated or whatever. Right, it was a stalking thing, which is bad enough. Sure.

Homicide involving stalking is horrible. Yeah. As far as going postal, it probably doesn't actually qualify. Yeah, and then 2006 it was a pretty interesting one, because mass shootings very rarely are at the hands of a woman. But Jennifer San Marcos in Goleta, California,

which is just outside Santa Barbara, and this was in 2006, she killed, how many people here? Six, I believe, she killed six co-workers, and notably all six of them were people of color. Yeah, this was in 2006. She was a very disturbed individual that had put out a lot of signs to her employers, including having to be carted away,

literally in a mail cart in handcuffs from the postal sorting facility she worked at, and committed for 72 hours involuntarily. Yeah. And she came back years later and killed six people on a rampage. She was known to be extraordinarily racist, and just spout racist stuff out loud.

Severely mentally ill. Right, to herself. Yeah. So yeah, she basically raised a lot of red flags, and I guess they let her go, and then she surprised everybody by coming back years later. Yeah, and side note, she applied for a permit

at one point in her life to publish a newspaper called The Racist Times, and I guess they were like, nah. Well, she applied for a business license to start a company to publish that, I guess, yeah. And I guess was rightfully denied. I guess, I don't know, can you as the local government say like-

Is that free speech? Yeah, I would think so, especially to local governments, but- Well, maybe she just didn't have it normalized or something. Especially in 2005, yeah, who knows? Yeah. By the way, I'm gonna apply,

one of my goals is to be a notary. Oh, really? Yeah. I heard Nick Thune became one. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, that's a very Nick Thune thing to do. He said everything I read in 2020

is gonna get a receipt. Signs, newspapers, magazines, receipts. So I guess he's gonna be, he's gonna notarize everything. Yeah, I got something notarized the other day, and I don't think you can notarize your own stuff, or can you? That seems unethical.

Yeah, so it's not like I wanna do it, because first of all, I don't need notaries that much. It's not like to save time, but I just thought what an interesting, weird kind of fun thing. Yeah. You know, Chuck Bryant, podcaster, notary public. I think you should get that,

like wrapped around your minivan. Yeah. You know? I don't have a minivan, for sure. I'd have to get a minivan. Step one's getting a minivan. This is your list for 2020. Get a minivan,

become a notary, get a wrap saying as much on your minivan. Have you seen that SUV here on the parking deck, the Kim Brothers karate that's wrapped? Yeah, it's great, because the whole side of it is this guy getting a stomach kick, and he's just like, ugh. In silhouette, a photo?

No, it's a full-on photo. It's like the size of the whole backseat door. Nice. And advertising Kim Brothers karate. Check that out. It's very, very awesome. It worked for him. It's pretty good.

The wrap worked. They're like, that was $400 well spent. And by the way, I wouldn't charge for my notary services either, that's the whole. It's not like to make extra, it's not a side hustle. Okay, but the thing is, it's like people don't value stuff that they get for free. My notary did it for free.

She even came in to work early to do it, and I was like, what? Oh, she said nothing. I went, no, seriously. And she said, I'm running for judge. She handed me a thing. She said, just vote for me. Okay, so that's not free?

I was like, that's illegal. That's quib pro quo. Quib pro quo. Oh, you don't even know what that means. Yeah, dude, it's Spanish, right? My daughter was watching. She frozen in Spanish the other day, and I went to change it.

She went, no, I want to leave it in Spanish. She said, SAP, SAP. And then she came out going, goza, I was like, what are you doing? She said, I'm speaking Spanish. So what's she speaking Spanish? And you just didn't understand her with the gibberish. It was gibberish, but I said, you know who speaks Spanish?

I said, Jerry's daughter. And she went, really? I said, yeah. And so she's going to learn Spanish now to speak to Jerry's daughter? At some point, she's going to. I don't know when, but I'm going to get her going. You know what I want to do?

I want to go on some like archeological trip to the Middle East, and then we'll overhear some scholar speaking Aramaic, and you'll realize that that's what it was saying after she watched Frozen 2. Yeah, right. Just like in, what is this, a movie? And not only is it Aramaic,

but it's like the location of Jimmy Hoffa's body or something in Aramaic. Or like the Holy Grail. What was the, oh, the exorcist. Oh, sure. Yeah. Or she's maybe, yeah, like some ancient tongue. Right.

Should we take a break? I feel like we're really off the rails. We should have taken a break like seven minutes ago. All right, we're going to take a break and we're going to go, it's actually a good spot because we're going to talk about whether or not there was something to go and post it right after this. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lassher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's get serious again. Okay. Because you would think that after these sort of a series

of shootings over a period of about a decade, even though that final one was in 2006, it was a bit of an outlier, that there would be big investigations into what's going on at the US Postal Service. And did that happen? There was, but it was ill-conceived. Yeah, let's talk about it.

Okay, so by this time when people are saying like going postal is the thing, your postal carrier's gonna snap and shoot up your whole family or whatever, the Postal Service realizes it has a PR problem on its hands. Exactly. So they hire a former Secretary of Health

and Human Services named Joseph Califano Jr. And he leads a commission, he chairs a commission to look into this going postal thing and to the great relief in $4 million payment of the Postal Service. You mean the US taxpayer? Right, yes. Califano and his group come back and say

going postal is a myth. Yeah, and this was after a report by the General Accounting Office that did their own investigation report. They actually issued six reports on poor labor management relations. That's just the GAO alone. Yeah, the toxic work environment there.

And so the US Postal Service via our money, like you said, threw down $4 million to try and clean that report up. Right, and so the Califano report is what it's called. It was pretty clever in its goals and execution. Yeah, for sure. It basically said, we're gonna look at the CDC stats about workplace deaths and workplace homicides

in particular, and we're gonna just compare stuff statistically, and they did. And they found that not only is it not particularly dangerous to work at the post office, but that some other professions, like working as a convenience store clerk. That was the irony that I said to put a pin in. Right, or working as a taxi driver.

Sure. Is far, far riskier as far as your chances of being killed in a homicide go. Yeah, 150 times likelier if you're a taxi driver than a postal worker, eight times as much if you're a retail worker, and basically most of those are convenience store clerks, like killed during a robbery. Yeah, exactly.

Or watch a postmaster get killed in your supply room. That's right. Either way, not a good day at work. I wonder which one that qualified for the CDC, because it was in a convenience store, but it was a postal service employee. I think it would be reflexive, meaning it would be. Go back to.

It would have to be at your workplace. Oh, okay. I think it would qualify as having been a. Both. Maybe. At that point, I think the CDC is like fine, both. This is just too convoluted. Yeah, I picture like a meeting with a bunch of people

sitting around smoking cigarettes, kind of debating this one. And then one guy just sticking a big bite of a club sandwich, just saying, just throw it in both. Right, they're like, this is after the new Gingrich-Bob Barr era, so we're not even allowed to use the word gun in the report, where you have to just say homicide by bang bang

or something. Whoa, bang bang. So the California report comes out, and again, it's at the very least a pretty convenient reading of statistics by the postal service. It is, and they basically said they had a press release. They held all sorts of interviews, and they had California, this respected government servant,

public servant come out and say, no, not only is this a bad rap for the post office, going postal is a myth, and to work at the post office, why you couldn't find a safer place to work in the United States. CDC statistics bear it out, here it is in black and white. And the press ate it up, because the idea that America and American culture was wrong,

that our intuition had gotten it wrong, and that actually it turns out that the whole thing's a myth. You and I would eat that up normally, but we get the even greater pleasure of saying that the Califano report was a myth, and that that's where a lot of people's reporting stops. Even today, if you look up going postal, and the idea of working at the post office being dangerous,

some reporting stops right there, that the Califano report proved that it was a myth, and it turns out that other people came along and said, this Califano report is way off, and here's the truth, going postal is actually quite real. It's just that the Califano commission went at it from the wrong direction. Well, kind of purposefully, not kind of purposefully,

very much purposefully. Four million dollars purposefully. Yeah, notably the one man named Steven Musaco, he's a, I don't even know what accent that was. You've been off a couple of weeks, you can tell. He is a 34 year veteran, was at the time of the USPS, worked, it says here nearly every capacity. I think he had a lot of jobs at the Postal Service,

and he wrote a book called Beyond Going Postal. Chuck, we should also say that his, one of those jobs was very important. He was a workplace improvement analyst, and one of the things that he was responsible for doing was figuring out what caused workplace violence at the Post Office. So he wasn't just like, you know,

just some guy who had some ideas, like this guy had learned firsthand what was really going on at the Post Office, and he saw this Califano report as a whitewash. Yeah, I mean, he said, and he used their own statistics, but he also used his own, you know, personal experience, anecdotal from his own point of view, and the research he did as that workplace improvement

analyst, and he was like, you know, let's look at the stats. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, part of the CDC said that 13% of worker-on-worker homicides in the 80s were postal employees, even though they account for 3 quarters of 1% of the civilian workforce. So 3 quarters of a percent of the workforce is responsible for 13% of the worker-on-worker

workplace homicides. Yeah, and I think he was the, I don't know about the first, but one of the major voices that was saying, okay, so you might get killed more often as a taxi driver, but not by another taxi driver. Right, and the very definition of going postal. It's not Mary Lou Hinner walking in and shooting Judd Hirsch in the taxi bay.

That would be going postal. Exactly, right. Or going taxi. Sure, well, it'd still be going postal. I guess so. It applied everywhere. Right. It means a worker-on-worker, usually homicide,

almost always in the workplace, usually related to work. I can't believe that it took someone to write a book to point this out. Right. And why everyone was going, oh, wait a minute, that convenience store employee getting robbed and killed is not the same as going in there and shooting up your office.

Yeah, I know, it's kind of bizarre. I'll bet the alternative press was all over it, but it took this guy to come along and write this book and be like, hey, hey, let me spell it out for you. So that was one thing, was he just basically said, like, yes, going postal is real, and here's the stats that prove it.

Yeah, and here's why. Yeah, that was another big one. Basically, it's a pretty toxic environment. They did a cert, the California report itself did a survey of 20,000 postal employees on their culture and compared that to national averages and other professions. And this is stuff, like I said,

it's in the California report that said, postal workers scored way, way lower than the national average in all seven areas of positive attitude towards management. Yeah, including. That was a big sticking point. Including, like, do you agree with the statement, I am confident in the fairness and honesty of management.

Right. They're like, no, no, not really. Do you feel like you have autonomy at work? That was a big one. No, well, not nobody, but they scored 39% favorable rating compared to the national average of 77. So basically half as much. Yep.

Said that they felt that they had autonomy or any kind of ability to direct their own work or self. Yeah, and it's, I wonder why, but it seems like the postal service, more than other jobs had a culture and it seems like they've tried to correct it. But so I can't speak to like the current status, but when I worked there in the 80s,

it seems like it had this weird culture of management being militaristic and talking down and dressing down employees in front of other employees. Yeah, so that was it. I mean, plain and simple, like that was the style. It was a kind of, I saw it described as a paramilitary style. And one of the big through lines that I think made a lot of postal workers,

and probably still do, but definitely didn't the 80s and 90s feel helpless, powerless, and pushed to the brink, was that they were subservient to their supervisors who's direct orders they had to follow. So imagine if, imagine first that Jerry's our boss, okay? Step two, imagine if we said, well, we're gonna do an episode on going postal. And Jerry said, I order you not to do that.

I don't want you guys talking about that. You can't do it. Well, and you gotta add, you're not doing two podcasts a week now, you're gonna do eight. Okay, and in not listening to Jerry, we could just lose our jobs just for that. She could be like, well, that's it,

you didn't listen, you're fired. That was the culture, that was the structure, and I think still is, at the post office, you had to follow a direct order from your supervisor, just like in the military, you had a choice. You either listened or you lost your job. That was a big one, okay? So that's kind of like this mindset

of how you are coming into work every day, and you're getting this every day, multiple times a day from this person. How do you not start to kind of hate this person who keeps pushing you and pushing you? Yeah, and they were understaffed and overworked. That was a big one. Working like sometimes up to 80 hours a week.

I think Nixon had charged them with being profitable, which was a big turn happened. That's where neoliberalism comes in. Is this idea that, so Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act of 1971, and said by 1983, the Postal Service needs to turn a profit. It's no longer going to be receiving taxpayer funding,

it needs to make its own money, and we're gonna open up competition from private industry, which is where FedEx and UPS came from. That's right. So it went from being a pretty cushy government job where you had a pension, and you were taken care of, you had a union, all this stuff. To all of a sudden, you're like pitted in competition

with private industry, and now you can be fired at the drop of a hat, and you have no protections any longer, it happened overnight. And a lot of people point to this as the Postal Service being among the first industry in the United States economy that was neoliberalized, where competition, deregulation, all this stuff happened as like a model at the Postal Service first,

and then it started to spread into the rest of industry, the rest of the economy, to where now it's just commonplace, it's just capitalism, you don't even call it neoliberalism anymore. And it's just normal to us, it's just doggy dog workplace where if your employer tosses you a few cents for your 401k, you're super grateful. That is not what it was like before,

and the Postal Service was the first group to kind of undergo this transformation. And so some people say, well, they're the first ones who had workplace shootings, and if you follow it, the workplace shooting started to get more and more prevalent as more and more of the economy was liberalized, so much so that in the 80s, workplace shootings tripled by the end of the decade, and they say,

well, it was because of this neoliberal revolution that came in and just upended that safety net to where if you didn't produce, produce, produce, you could be tossed out on the street, and nobody'd be held accountable for that. Some people don't handle that very well, and they can snap and come in and shoot up their workplace, and that's what some people explain the going postal as.

Right, and you combine that with incidents of mental illness, and the gun culture in this country, and this is where we are. Another thing that was going on at the Post Office was, or the Postal Service was that there was not much of a, there was no way to, if you had an issue, to really fix it. Their grievance process was just ridiculous. As of April 2000, and this is when

the California report was released, you would have to go to an art, you could file a grievance and go to an art, and they would provide arbitration, but as of April 2000, there were 126,000 grievances awaiting arbitration, which was one grievance for every seven workers. One out of seven had it filed an official grievance.

That's not just like, I'm unhappy, and I'm complaining to my spouse at home. This is an official filed grievance. And from what I understand, a file in official grievance was a big deal because your managers could retaliate against you with impunity, and harass you out of your job, basically. Yeah, well, it's what we see now and forever before this

with filing a grievance on sexual harassment. It's like, you're probably on the way out the door if that happened. I mean, things are changing a little bit now. Oh yeah, big time. Yeah, so since 2006, this has really dropped off, I think only four incidents since 2013, and two of those, or I'm sorry, three of the four

were at a FedEx or a UPS. Yeah. But I guess going FedEx isn't really catchy. No, going postal. Going postal is. Yeah, and now you can go postal at your local going postal franchise, where you can pick up your mail. That's amazing.

And relative security, it's so bizarre. It is, what a weird world in country. What's weird to me is like, you want this to be wrapped up somehow, and it's not. It's just kind of ongoing, but it's just turned into something else spread, it's weird. Well, if you want to know more about going postal, you can look that up on the internet,

see what you come up with. And we are aware of the game postal. I don't know if we mentioned it or not. We didn't. Okay. Is it a video game? Yeah. How do you get away from making a game like that?

I think they really enjoyed the shock value of it. You think? It got, the second one got banned in New Zealand and Australia, I read. Interesting. Okay, I think long ago, it's time for Listener Man. I'm going to call this a safe cracking. We got a lot of good remarks about safe cracking,

including one guy that said, we did the best job of explaining how locks work. And that's, I was like, really? Yeah. Did you listen to the same episode that we talked about? That was high praise. It was high praise. Hey guys, just listened to the safe cracking, great work.

I am co-host of Heist podcast, about the famous Heist from history, plug plug. I thought you did a solid informative piece on safe cracking, a couple of things here. Chuck was actually correct. Some safe crackers do use acetylene torches. For example, the mysterious expert Australian safe cracker known as Mr. X.

No. Wasn't that from Arrested Development? That was Mr. F. Oh, was it? Mr. F. I watched a few of those the other night too. Such a great show. Yeah, it is great.

It used, Mr. X used an acetylene torch to cut a two inch hole into the safe of Carrie Packer at the time the richest man in Australia to steal five and a half million dollars in gold. Safe. Two fun facts about the history of safe cracking. The little joker was a tool used in the early 1900s. It was a tin wheel you could place

behind the combination dial of a safe. And when the bank manager would enter the combination to the vault each day, it would record the combination via little notches on the tin. Required a robber to break into the bank twice though, wants to plan it and wants to retrieve it. But the upside is you could pull out the little joker into the combination and walk right into the vault.

Wow. But you double your exposure. Yeah, but that sounds like a pretty good way to do it if you're going to double your exposure. By the way, that safe I bought, it came and Emily was like, we really need a different kind of safe. Really? It's like, really?

She's like, yeah. So now I got this stupid, heavy box. Right. I'm not quite sure what to do with it. Maybe I'll try and sell it on Craigslist or something. Sure. Do you remember the combo? I haven't said it and it's a key, mainly.

So you're also, you can sell it on Craigslist. Have some weirdos come over to your house to buy a safe. Maybe notarize something for them while they're there. Make a podcast out of this. I think this is begging for it. And then another fun fact, Baron Max Shinburn was a bank robber and machinist who took a job at the Lilly safe company at the time,

the biggest safe company in the US during the late 1800s. He worked there for a year. Not only did he learn everything about how the safes worked, he also snuck little jokers into safes. No. Before they were shipped out, and then when he quit, he and his crew traveled to the US and broke into all these safes he had put the back doors

into. They broke into so many Lilly safes that some say Max and his crew were single-handedly responsible for putting Lilly's safe company out of business. Wow. And then he said all of us at the Heist podcast are massive fans. And that is from co-host Matt Unsworth.

Matt, thank you so much for that. I think you gave us so much information. There's no need for anybody to go listen to the Heist podcast. No, I want to go check it out. You shot yourself in the foot. Yeah, it sounds like a pretty great podcast. Like a good Heist movie, so maybe I'll like a good Heist podcast.

If you like a good Heist movie, you're going to love a good Heist podcast. I think so. Well, thank you for writing in for that. That was pretty great. Let's see, if you want to get in touch with us and let us know about your awesome podcast, we want to hear about it.

You can go on to stuffyshinno.com, follow our social links there. I believe they're still there. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. [???] Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.