#I am a symbiotic postal parasite that will sadly live to sort the life blood of usps for another day

[birdbutt]

personal tma episode today woohoo I suppose (uh.... cw for rotten/scary ?food? I guess)

I work in mail sorting. In one of The Big mail sorting plants, the kind of building lined with conveyor belts that take things across the building, up and down different floors, just wherever it needs to get to so it can leave in the right direction to the local stations and parcel carriers. A big mechanical nervous system. Filled with packages or letters instead of flesh or blood.

You find a lot of weird things in the mail. You just have to learn to ignore it. It gets weirder even on the overnight shift. Not just drugs or other illegal oddities, but those truly bizarre sights you know you'll have no way of describing later. If you even remember them after a long night.

8pm to 5am is when I'm there. We even sort on Sundays. Have to get the mail to your station by Monday you know? I usually like to listen to podcasts while I work. I mean, I'm just standing in place, waiting for that labyrinth of moving belts and conveyors to drop the next round of mail into my chute so I can start sorting the zip codes. I'll put each package on another conveyor belt, key in a code on a small number console, then watch the package get taken away and dropped into another cart or chute somewhere. There's four other drop chutes just like mine, lined up along the main belt behind me, with another equally bored or just plain tired plant worker waiting for the next round of endless deliveries to sort. All listening to their own music or books or even having a late night phone conversation. Today I was playing The Magnus Archives. It really didn't feel like it would matter what I listened to at the time. I was in the middle of episode 36 - Taken Ill, and as the narrator started describing the sickly horror of the scripted week a package at the top of my chute broke open and a slimy, pale yellow, almost gray fluid starts pouring out... well oozing out. It seemed slow, but happened so fast that I couldn't have done anything to help minimize it even if I wanted to get close enough to do that. It got over everything. The belt, the chute, the other packages, even the floor. It didn't just get my area either. When it broke it was still close enough to the main conveyor belt that it spread to the other four chutes after me too. The smell was so strong I almost couldn't move at first. Almost sweet. Before the strench of almost tangible rot slammed it's way so hard into my brain my legs nearly gave out.

Well the stench obviously traveled all over. Farther than normal I guess. Everyone on our floor level could smell it and was coming over to find out what happened. I mean everyone too which is impressive. This is not a small building, it takes about five minutes for someone fit to speed walk from one end of our floor to the other. So it was kind of a joke everytime we caught another brave soul wandering over from so far to try and figure out just what the hell they were being forced to smell.

We get people trying to mail cooked foods or meals all the time, it always turns rotten before the package even makes it to a sorting plant. Always. It's so stupid, but also so common you hardly notice it after a couple months there. A turkey sandwich in a manilla envelope, ham with mashed potatoes on a ceramic plate, a plastic baggy of homemade pickles. Almost makes me chuckle sometimes. Well, almost chuckle AFTER, the slime and smell of what used to be something consumable gets mopped up. So that full bodied stench of old organic rot isn't foreign to us in the plants by any means. Nobody could say for sure what had rotted though, but we all agreed it was definitely familiar. When we removed the box from the top of the chute we still couldn't figure out what it was. Usually when one of these busts we get to see what ever moldy, decomposed chunk meat or produce someone tried to mail ooze out of the soggy cardboard when picked up. This was somehow just slime. A molded pale yellow that almost seemed gray. There wasn't anything else. It looked like someone had packaged up only the decay while leaving out what originally fed it. If there had ever been anything else it seemed to have already completely liquefied. And it filled the entire box and more. It seemed to be too much for the package that broke. We all tried to joke about how long the package must have been lost in the twisted turns of the never ending veins of sorting machinery to get /that/ rancid, but we couldn't bare to keep our mouth open too long around it. Thinking back I don't remember anyone actually complaining about the SMELL, just how it was stronger than normal, strong enough to taste. All from a square box barely 7 inches long. A box that hadn't even smelled until it spilled open. Or we thought it had spilled, we couldn't see what might have been the tape holding it closed anywhere in the soggy mess.

Because it was just so... wet we almost forgot to check if the mailing info was still intact any any way before we binned it for another crew to inspect and clean. No chance of saving it at this point. The address had melted away into that yellowish sick of spoiled matter, but the postage mark was still dry. Pristine even. A bright unmarked spot of bright dry paper on a sea of decomposing filth where there sat a single fly. That lonely insect drawing my attention to the smallest bit of information that I would have never noticed, or thought to check, without the dance it seemed to do right on top. Pointing me to the punchline of a joke I never wanted to know.

It had been sent locally that same day.

You find a lot of weird things in the mail. You just have to learn to ignore it.