More like winners and non-winners. I'm sure you've met people who say 'I never win anything. I'm so unlucky.' Tonight I was thinking about how as much as I might feel like that, it's not true.

There was that time my company's Christmas party was at a Westin hotel in Denver and I won the drawing for a free room the night of the party. It was a lovely room and a real treat with their special bed.

That was the year I had talked Mr. Troutbend into getting a temporary job at the post office for the Christmas rush. He worked the graveyard shift (11 pm to 7 am) because it paid a little bit more per hour. It was a six week stint with occasional required overtime. He was good at it - memorized all the zip codes within a few days, after all he used to be an aerospace engineer. His supervisor told Mr. Troutbend he was the best employee he'd ever had. But of course Mr. Troutbend hated it and couldn't wait for the six weeks to end.

He worked in the package sorting operation and had a few stories to tell me about the sorts of things that people mail. For one thing there were concrete samples going to a lab at the Federal Center in Denver and once in awhile they came undone, so an unidentifiable chunk of aggregate would be circulating on the conveyor belt. Some of the packages were very large, such as exercise equipment weighing up to 70 pounds. It was all some of the employees could do to wrestle those big boxes into the bins destined for Bozeman or Cheyenne, and the technique was to perch it on the edge of the bin and let 'er drop, crushing whatever was already in there. Take note.

What he came to hate the most was what he called 'boxes of fruit.' There were whole truck loads of boxes of fruit. Years later I found out they were all from Harry and David; hundreds maybe thousands of boxes.

One time he hit his elbow really hard on something and it hurt so much he had to lie down on the floor for bit. I asked him if he reported it and he said no. 'Oh shoot,' I said 'now if it turns out to be a medical problem you're going to have to re-enact the event and report it then so you can get Workers Comp coverage.'

Another problem was driving home through the Denver rush hour when he was so sleepy he could barely stay awake, and then trying to sleep during the day.

When the six weeks was up, his supervisor told Mr. Troutbend he'd like him to stay on for another temporary stint. Mr. T declined, but didn't tell the personnel people, so they kept him on the books as an employee, and eventually here came a letter from the post office telling him he'd been fired for not showing up to work.

Anyhow back to how this story started. Mr. Troutbend had to work the night we stayed at the Westin, so he left from there and then early in the morning showed up at the valet all dirty and tired. They looked at him funny, as if they wondered what he'd been up to all night.

This is our post office in Summerlin, NV. I couldn't find any pictures of the facility he worked at.