Word: clerkly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pity the poor postalworker, however hard that may be for the millions who have stood in line for half an hour staring at the wanted flyers, only to have a gum-snapping clerk reject their package because it fails to comply with official wrapping regulations ("No string; paper tape only. Next!"). Attracted to their positions by good pay, generous benefits, job security and a predictable, not to say slow, pace, today's postalworkers are being dragged | against their will into the 21st century by the anthem of the Age of Fax: get a move...
...irate Boston mail handler in a stolen airplane strafed the city streets with an AK-47. During a 13-hour siege in New Orleans last December, a mail handler shot his supervisor in the face, killing him, and wounded three other people. In Massachusetts in June 1988, a clerk killed a co-worker in the parking lot and later committed suicide. A postalworker in Edmund, Okla., went on the third deadliest killing spree in U.S. history in 1986, murdering 14 co-workers before killing himself...
...nightmare of the new automation is the optical character reader, which shoots out 30,000 pieces of mail an hour and shows no mercy. A postal clerk has about a second to read an address and punch in the first three digits of the ZIP code, which is then translated into a bar-code symbol for sorting mail by carrier route. With no way to slow down the machine, the clerk is like Lucille Ball in her comic routine at a candy factory. One moment, Lucy is standing at the conveyor belt blithely wrapping individual candies; the next...
Mamet's wit at first appears equally prankish -- the stage is ablaze with hellfire and brimstone, aroar with howls and explosions, and the devil's chief clerk (Steve Goldstein) doggedly keeps trying to tell a "two Jews in a bar" joke -- but he has more serious matters in mind. His subject is how to live morally in this world rather than penitently in the next, and the dynamic that fascinates him is why people make excuses, time and again, rather than attempt to be better. The title character, played by Treat Williams, is the conscience-pricked but ultimately expedient movie...
...hasn't been offered," Healy said. But even if a bid were made, the city clerk informed the council, a municipal ordinance would preclude him from accepting such a position for a period of two years after leaving city government...