Wired magazine made us all chuckle a couple of years back with an item in its Jargon Watch column, where some wag made a play on the unfortunate fact that so many of the employees of the United States Postal Service do seem to go off their rockers and storm into their offices armed with assault weapons, a phenom one might call going postal (As in, Darling, don’t go postal over the fact that I forgot our anniversary, or, Sally seems to have gone a bit postal and shot 25 of her former workmates, and so forth). Now we have evidence that the while the USPS does have a sense of humor, it doesn’t extend to this connotation of the third letter in its acronym. A Tucson, Arizona game company called Running With Scissors, developer of a game on the theme called Postal, has received a letter of complaint from the institution. Marvin Runyon, the Postmaster General of the US wrote: All of us at the Postal Service have a sense of humor, but there is nothing funny about your game ‘Postal.’ The company, tongue placed firmly in cheek, is playing innocent, saying that the beserk character who wigs out in the game is never identified as a postal worker, and decrying the USPS’s attempt to claim a proprietary right to use the word ‘postal.’ I was really excited about getting a letter from the Postmaster General, giggles RWS spokesman Vince Desi, but nowhere near as excited as I was after I heard from their law firm! What’s next – former members of the KGB writing to their Duma representatives complaining about all the Russian bad guys in spy movies?
á
