Got a package the other day. The kind I had to sign for. Not a real signature of course, but the manic, lurching squiggle you get when someone else holds out a little screen for you to finger. The box said (loudly) CONTAINS ALCOHOL: Check for I.D. Do not deliver to an intoxicated person.

A lot of things have changed in the delivery business since I was a letter carrier, none of them for the better, but this is not an instruction we ever had to deal with. Personally, I would not be anxious to march up to someone’s front door with a very large parcel loudly containing alcohol, only to meet someone three sheets to the wind who’s looking for an extra sail, and have to yank it back. “I don’t think so, Bucko,” I’d have to say, and it wouldn’t go over well at all, and he’d end up yelling at me all the way back to the truck. “If you needed me sober, you should have gotten here before ten in the morning!”

Probably nothing would come of it. Letter carriers occupy an odd niche in people’s lives and they tend to think of us as some sort of real officials, right up there with the police and the I.R.S. I think it’s the uniform. I know I could walk around uniformed in parts of town I’d be nervous about if I was wearing my civvies. There’s no sense to be made of that, especially in light of the disreputable condition most carriers’ uniforms are in. Nobody can wrinkle up permanent-press like a hardened letter carrier.

It wouldn’t have done any good to mushily protest to a letter carrier that you’re not intoxicated. We knew intoxicated. On any given day a full third of the work force was either hungover or applying medicinal alcohol to a hangover, no matter what time of day it was. The very first day I carried mail, in 1977, I was accompanying my trainer on his route. We sorted the mail—well, mostly he did, but I poked in a few pieces here and there—pulled it down, banded it out, arranged it in our truck, and drove to Clementine’s Lounge down the street. We joined another eight employees at the bar who already had their Bloody Marys going and one of them was our supervisor. It was eight a.m.

Don’t tell me you’re not drunk, Mister. You’re both of you drunk.

Sobriety was not a requirement in our job, way back in the ‘70s. But there was never a chance a letter carrier would break into a customer’s box of alcohol. We were intemperate, vulgar, soiled, unmanageable, and insubordinate, but by all that’s holy we could deliver mail. In a crew with not much else to be proud of, we were fiercely proud of that. We’d get that last letter delivered if the slot was up thirty icy steps and guarded by a surly Afghan hound with a brain the size of a pistachio. We’d deliver it if it was addressed only to Grandma Main Street. We’d hold that big package under our rain cape, looking like a walking TV set, and deliver it safe and dry in the designated hidey-hole only we knew about.

My goodness, I once had a customer who was having an affair, and her beloved sent a mash note on a post card so her husband would see it, and I delivered it to her personally at her office instead.

Well, I liked her.

Anyway, now the post office tolerates none of that, although it does track a letter carrier’s every twitch and step, and believes it can quantify their performance according to metrics that make sense only to people who have never delivered mail, and stuff gets misdelivered or lost with considerably more frequency by miserable but sober people who can’t wait to start drinking after they punch off the clock.

Hey. If the Postmaster General doesn’t care, and he doesn’t, why should the carriers?