Delay, Linger--and Rush

One look at the line and Brad Dean knew he had to find another way.

It was the busiest mailing day of the year, and a 15-minute wait at the Van Nuys main post office simply would not do. He had to get back to work. So the Van Nuys resident poked his head into an employee area and made an impassioned plea to a passing clerk. The clerk sprang to his aid and Dean was on his way in seconds.

Others seeking a quick exit from postal purgatory met with no helpful clerks and less luck. And at about the same time a few miles away, the wait was pushing one hour at the Van Nuys-Civic Center postal station.

Because next Monday will be too late to send most items via regular mail and have them arrive before Christmas--and because, as U.S. Postal Service spokesman David Mazer put it, “Americans are procrastinators”--Southern Californians who spent the weekend shopping flocked to their post offices when the weekend was over.

So did postal workers.

And with rare exceptions, both sides seemed willing to play their respective roles with good cheer, a survey of postal workers showed.

“Christmas is different--people are generally in good spirits,” said Van Nuys Postmaster Michael Martino,

“unlike tax night, where it’s like, ‘Hey, I got no patience for anybody.’ ”

Said customer service supervisor Cathy MacInnes: “The workers are expecting the crowds. The crowds are expecting the lines. It’s all expected.”

Expected as well were 28 million cards and letters to be mailed from Southern California on Monday alone--about 20 million from Los Angeles County, 3 million of those from the San Fernando Valley area. At 32 cents a stamp, that’s almost $9 million in holiday cheer by mail.

Nationwide, the Postal Service expected to handle some 275 million cards and letters Monday, or about three times that of an average day.

And by the time the Thanksgiving-through-Christmas holiday season wraps up, it is predicted by postal officials that Americans will have sent 4.9 billion cards and letters--up 4% over last year--and 100 million packages, a 10% increase over 1995.

The more mail items that are addressed and packaged properly--the ZIP Code plainly visible, for example, the envelope sealed--the fewer will wind up in the “hamper” of Van Nuys claims clerk Angel Santana.

On Monday, he spent the first three hours of the day sorting hundreds of items that had slipped from improperly wrapped packages and so are unlikely to make it to their holiday destinations on time. Among them: 70 bank checks, a stack of lovely wedding photos and a size 36-A Bestform bra.

At the Van Nuys Civic Center station, friends Sylvia Soriano and Carolynn Warner, along with their children, spent nearly an hour in line--just to buy a box that still had to be filled with Christmas presents and mailed.

While the line at the Van Nuys main office grew and shrank and grew again Monday, folding onto itself, vehicles streamed through the ample parking lot of the former postal distribution center to leave holiday greetings in the drop box.

And at a table set up near the drop box, a medical company offered harried mailers “computerized heart-risk appraisals” and blood-pressure monitoring.

But on this, the busiest mailing day of the year, customers zipped past the medical company’s display without stopping.

They clearly didn’t need to stand in another line to discover their blood pressure was pumped up.