Just finished Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. Sans the suburban dryness I usually get from reading T.C. Boyle's After The Plague, it felt good. Although I'm not the type who can dissect for a book report the dry Brit humor Pratchett (and to some extent, Douglas Adams) espouses, I am one with the masses who love a happy ending and I'll leave it at that.

And so I chanced upon another wiki entry for Going Postal, which is

used as a verb meaning to become extremely angry, possibly to the point of violence. The term derives from a series of incidents from 1986 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public. Between 1986 and 1997, more than 40 people were killed in at least 20 incidents of workplace rage. Following this series of events, the idiom entered common parlance and has been applied to murders committed by employees in acts of workplace rage, irrespective of the employer; and generally to describe fits of rage in or outside the workplace.

Come to think of it, aside from getting the insides of our forearms sexually sensitive from hogging the keyboard all day, there really are instances when we could have also gone postal, jumped the couch, or snapped our wirings. The closed workplace (cubicle) within an enclosed environment (the manufacturing campus) within an enclave (science park) plus the fact that 99% of us are men with pent-up reptilian urges, the recipe is quite perfect.

I don't know how we manage the rage. Entertainment perhaps, like juicy office rumors. Or maybe we bottle it up until good old Death collects them, lovingly labeled Stress, Hypertension, Heart Attack, and another one reserved for the reaper himself.

Good Omens is next.

This entry was posted by sky, on Tuesday, July 18, 2006. You can leave your response.