Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night – but snakes are another story

Last updated on: May 23, 2016 at 8:09 am by Jane the Actuary

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night – but snakes are another story 2016-05-23T08:09:39-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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This is either a humorous little nothing story, or points to a real problem.

As reported by the Chicago Fox affiliate, one Chicago block has, rather than rabbits or squirrels or feral cats, large numbers of snakes — and the assigned mail carrier has a snake phobia and refuses to step foot on their sidewalks. So they wait and wait for their mail. “For some, it’s only been delivered twice in the last two weeks,” the article says.

This is Chicago. These are garter snakes, entirely harmless. True story: growing up, in a thoroughly suburban neighborhood, the half-mile long parcel of land behind our house sat vacant from before we moved in until after I left for college, as the city and the developer squabbled over the permitted uses and density of this very valuable piece of real estate. (It’s now a couple blocks of high-priced houses, a buffer zone, and a major upscale mall.) This meant that we had lots of space to roam, and enjoyed such things as picking up snakes from under rocks (OK, large pieces of concrete from the property’s past life) or, one year, catching tadpoles and putting them in a bucket with pond water (actually, the “ponds” were rectangular; we assumed former building foundations) to watch them turn into frogs.

So: rogue mail carrier, and, heck, not as bad, at least, as the stories of mailmen who hide undelivered mail in their homes?

According to the Chicago Tribune, which has more detail, there’s more to the story.

[Resident Mary] Harris said she isn’t the only person on the block not receiving mail. About 10 other neighbors wrote in response to a neighborhood email that their mail also wasn’t being delivered. Harris said that when she stopped the carrier and a supervisor earlier this week to ask why, the mail carrier said she is deathly afraid of snakes and refuses to deliver her mail until they’re gone. . . .

Mark Reynolds, spokesman for the Postal Service’s Chicago district, said mail carriers have the right to determine if an environment is unsafe and, if so, they are not forced to deliver mail to that area.

“In this case, the woman is terrified of snakes. When she saw them she freaked out,” he said. “It is irrelevant if the snakes are dangerous or not. Our employees’ safety is the utmost priority.”

Reynolds said a supervisor has been assigned to walk with the carrier from door to door to assess the situation for the next week or so. . . .

Bonnie Wagner, another resident on the block, said Thursday that she has seen the supervisor walking alongside the mail carrier the past three days. “When they get to a house, he goes in front of her, and then signals to her with his hand that the coast is clear.”

In other words, the Post Office is using “safety” terminology to accomodate, not an actual danger, but an employee’s phobia. And, to be sure, Reynolds further explains the situation as one of difficulty reassigning mail carriers — though it’s not clear if it’s a matter of everyone knowing and being familiar with their route and the people on it, or union seniority issues trumping customer service. But I suppose when it comes down to it, you could read this story one of two ways: as the Post Office being indifferent to mail delivery and far more concerned with letting individual workers get away with nonsense because of a lax service culture and union protections, or a temporary and sensitive accomodation to help a worker get past a fear.

How do you read it?

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWestern_terrestrial_garter_snake_juvie.jpg; By James Bettaso [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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