Smokin' Joe!

Except it's not my Joe but instead a random Joe! Reesie will get a kick out of this story though...turns out she really could be my stalker since she apparently lives close enough to me to be able to see into my house without binoculars!
Our postman has always had a little bit of an issue delivering our mail. We get other people's mail all the time, from a few doors down, from the street over, etc. Just randomly messing up on a fairly regular basis. He often parks his truck next to the house around noon to have lunch. Never thought much about our mailman really.

Until my landlord and I were talking the other day. They live downstairs so of course they have the same mailman. They're an elderly couple--he's 93 or so and she's about 85. And oh she loves neighborhood gossip!

It turns out that our mailman was a bit of a slacker on the job. He would finish up the mail route around 2PM or so when he was supposed to go back to the post office and work. Instead, he would hook up with a couple buddies and they would park their trucks in an empty lot behind the town high school where they would hang out and smoke pot. They would occasionally leave the trucks for an hour or two and go get beers then go back to the post office and finish up the day. Finally, after they had been doing this for a few years, a woman called it in--she wanted to know why her tax dollars were being wasted by postmen smoking joints on the job. The city or state or whomever did a huge surveillance--cameras all over the place near the school and in other places where they went. Captured all of their stints playing hooky on tape. And of course, fired them in the end.

Apparently our postman had been working there for 14 years, had a family, etc. Lost his job, pension, etc. in a flat second for total stupidity. This was apparently on the local news but I haven't been able to find any info online about this story.

My landlady totally cracked me up. She was so horrified. She had really liked the guy apparently. I never knew him. She was just so so so so shocked. I was just chuckling because now I had a real reason why I was always getting Mary So-and-So's mail...