Three Rights

Not everything is life makes sense, but most things do. They don’t always make sense to me, but they make sense to someone, usually someone that has all of the information. It’s taken me many, many, many years to figure this out, which indicates I was befuddled by life for many, many, many years.

Of course life is still often confusing, but if I take the time to really study an issue, then I will generally understand the reasoning behind it. Just because I understand how an engine works, that doesn’t mean I can fix it. The world is just one large and complicated machine that works. We are just a small part of the machine and although we seem to be fouling and destroying the machine, who’s to say this doesn’t make sense to someone somewhere.

When I first started to work at the Post Office, I did as I was told and delivered the mail without really caring about the why’s involved. I suppose that any job becomes easy after a while and it will eventually cease to take all of your concentration. Then, that is when you can start to examine the job that you are doing. In those early days at the Post Office, the letter carrier walks were more or less rectangular. They would begin and end within a block or two, close to a main street. The fact that there was a bus stop within a few feet didn’t make sense until the job got easy.

Of course they would set the walks up so that we could get to and from the depot with relative ease. We would either walk out to our “walk” or we took the bus, whichever was the most efficient. Since the Post Office paid the city for four trips per carrier a day, the bosses frowned on us taking our own cars. That just meant we had to avoid being seen, because taking our cars saved time and that meant we could get home earlier.

The walks would go with the flow of traffic whenever it was possible. That meant that the mailboxes were always on our right hand side which for 90% of the world, it made delivery easier. You could have the mail in your hand and flip the lid of the mailbox up and drop it in the box without slowing down at all. In fact, I would get angry when I had to stop to drop mail in a box. In later years, the people planning the walks didn’t understand this and they would have the walks going the “wrong” way, so that only 10% of the people had an easy time of it. That might be why I resent lefties to this day.

Walking on the right hand side of the road would always mean that you would eventually make right hand turns onto side streets which would also be right delivery. I imagine that the people at the Post Office knew centuries ago that three rights make a left. Left turns are always dangerous, whether walking or driving, and more likely than not they are also unproductive when compared to right turns.

I guess I have lived my life making right turns; it’s safer in the long run. I’m not sure if it is faster, or if safer is the best way to live a life. I have less life ahead of me than I have behind me, and I think I’ll start to make more left turns. I’ll still look both ways of course…