Going Postal

By the mid‑1990s, “going postal” was shorthand in American English for an office worker snapping so violently that people died.^[1] It grew out of a string of shootings involving United States Postal Service employees, beginning in the mid‑1980s, that left dozens of coworkers dead and terrified people who sorted mail for a living.^[1] Even as the numbers eventually showed postal jobs were statistically safer than most workplaces, the words stuck.^[1][2]

Years later, Terry Pratchett would take that same phrase and hang it over a very different post office—one staffed by golems and con artists in the fantasy city of Ankh‑Morpork.^[1][3] His novel Going Postal and its 2010 television adaptation leaned into the absurdity of bureaucracy, not its body count.^[3]

Between those two meanings—one comic, one soaked in real blood—sits a story about how a workplace turned into a cultural punch line, and what that did to the people inside it.

From Edmond to Royal Oak: When the Mailroom Turned Deadly

The modern story of “going postal” usually starts in Edmond, Oklahoma.

On August 20, 1986, a letter carrier walked into the post office there and opened fire on his coworkers.^[2] By the time he turned the gun on himself, 14 employees were dead and six more were wounded.^[1][2] It was the sort of mass workplace killing that had been rare enough to feel almost unimaginable. Overnight, a post office became national shorthand for an office under siege.

The killings did not stop.

On November 14, 1991, another former postal worker, Thomas McIlvane, brought a rifle into the post office in Royal Oak, Michigan.^[1] By the end, five people—including McIlvane himself—were dead, and five more were injured.^[1] He had been fired from the Postal Service for “insubordination” and had previously been suspended after altercations with customers on his route.^[1]

Royal Oak was more than a single man with a gun. Before the shooting, the facility was already on lawmakers’ radar for what staff described as a toxic workplace. The Postal Service there had drawn local media coverage for labor‑management and operational problems and a stream of customer complaints.^[1] Senator Carl Levin’s office had sent staff to investigate; their September 10, 1991 memorandum documented patterns of harassment, intimidation, cruelty, and allegations of favoritism inside the Royal Oak operation.^[1]

Those horror stories—and the paper trail behind them—helped cement a disturbing narrative: that postal facilities weren’t just scenes of individual violence, but pressure cookers primed to explode.

From 1970 to 1997, more than 40 people were killed by current or former postal employees in at least 20 incidents of workplace rage.^[1] A contemporary Florida newspaper put it another way in 1993: “Thirty‑five people have been killed in 11 post office shootings since 1983.”^[1] The exact tally depended on which cases were counted, but the impression was the same. People were dying at work, and the return address kept reading “U.S. Postal Service.”

The Birth of a Catchphrase

The words followed the violence.

By late 1993, “going postal” had made the jump from grim office whisper to print. An early recorded use appeared on December 17, 1993, in the St. Petersburg Times, which was reporting on post office shootings and the new slang.^[1] That piece spelled out the toll—those 35 deaths in 11 shootings—and noted that the Postal Service wanted the phrase to disappear.^[1]

Two weeks later, on December 31, the Los Angeles Times used “going postal” to describe “shooting up the office.”^[1] The term’s meaning was already clear enough to carry a sentence.

By then, the pattern of violent incidents was established enough for a broader summary: from 1986 onward, a series of mass murders by postal workers had given the expression its dark roots.^[1] The phrase came to mean becoming so uncontrollably angry—usually in a workplace—that the rage tipped into violence.^[1]

Inside postal facilities, those words landed hard. The agency formally “did not approve” of the term and tried to discourage its use.^[1] To people who moved letters for a living, it was more than gallows humor; it was a brand.

Scrambling for Answers: New Jobs, New Hearings

The shootings of the early 1990s forced changes, even if they couldn’t erase the stereotype.

On May 6, 1993, two separate postal shootings, one in Dearborn, Michigan and another in Dana Point, California, left more employees dead and wounded.^[4] In response, the Postal Service created 85 new positions that same year: Workplace Environment Analysts, one for each postal district.^[1] Their brief was blunt—help prevent violence and improve conditions on the workroom floor.^[1] The positions would last until 2009, when they were quietly eliminated in a round of downsizing.^[1]

By 1998, national lawmakers were formally asking whether the Postal Service had a unique violence problem or simply a unique reputation. That year, Congress held a joint hearing dedicated to violence in the U.S. Postal Service.^[1] One of the striking statistics aired there cut both ways: the Postal Service made up less than 1 percent of the full‑time civilian labor force, but 13 percent of workplace homicides were committed at postal facilities by current or former employees.^[1]

To many people watching, that clinched the case. The postal service didn’t just feel dangerous; the numbers, framed that way, said it was.

Tearing Apart the “Going Postal” Myth

The Postal Service’s own leadership asked for a harder look.

In 1998, Postmaster General William J. Henderson set up an independent commission to study aggressive behavior in postal workplaces.^[2] He turned to Joseph A. Califano Jr.—a former secretary of health, education and welfare—to lead it.^[2]

Over two years, the commission surveyed 12,000 postal workers and 3,000 employees in other jobs, and conducted more than 300 interviews with postal managers and union representatives.^[2] The work cost nearly $4 million and produced a 249‑page report.^[2]

The findings undercut the most lurid assumptions.

The commission concluded there was far less on‑the‑job homicide in the Postal Service than in other workplaces.^[2] Postal employees, it found, were only about one‑third as likely to be homicide victims at work as other American workers.^[2] A separate 2000 study of workplace homicides put hard numbers to that: 0.22 homicides per 100,000 postal workers, versus 0.77 per 100,000 workers overall.^[1] Retail, not mail, had the highest rates—2.1 homicides per 100,000 workers per year.^[1]

Goleta: A New Mass Killing in a Familiar Place

On the night of January 30, 2006, that shadow became reality again in Goleta, California.

Around 9:15 p.m., a former postal worker arrived at a large 24‑hour mail sorting facility in the coastal town near Santa Barbara and opened fire.^[1][5] More than 50 people were working inside.^[5] All the victims would later be described as postal employees.^[5]

By the time officers reached the scene, two people lay dead outside the building.^[5] Inside, police found two injured women; one later died in the hospital, while the other was in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head.^[5] A subsequent search turned up three more victims—and the body of the attacker.^[5] In total, six postal workers were dead at the facility, and a seventh victim, connected to the shooter, was later found killed in a Goleta condominium complex where she had once lived.^[1]

The attacker was identified as 44‑year‑old Jennifer San Marco, a former employee at the plant.^[1][5] Some media accounts reported that the Postal Service had forced her to retire in 2003 because of worsening mental problems, though that specific claim has not been uniformly supported across reports.^[1] Other descriptions labeled Goleta “the deadliest workplace shooting ever carried out in the United States by a woman,” a phrasing that has likewise been treated cautiously in later coverage.^[1]

For people on the floor that night, none of that nuance mattered. The attack fit the worst public stereotype of a postal shooting: a former employee returning to kill coworkers in a place that was supposed to be routine.

Postmaster General John E. Potter said he was in “complete shock.”^[5] He promised counseling for families and employees and offered “heartfelt prayers and condolences” to those who had “suffered through this tragic incident.”^[5]

To a public that had never quite let go of the phrase “going postal,” Goleta felt less like an aberration and more like confirmation.

How Hollywood, Sitcoms, and a Fantasy Post Office Ran With It

Once a phrase like “going postal” sinks into the language, it rarely stays put.

By the mid‑1990s, the idea of the dangerously unstable postal worker had already been played for laughs on screen. In the 1994 spoof Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, disgruntled postal workers appear among the film’s broad gags, and one scene shows dozens of them randomly firing weapons in every direction.^[1][6] It was part of a cascade of references that turned a specific pattern of killings into a generalized trope.

The Postal Service pushed back in court when the satire came too close to its nameplate. In 1997, the agency sued the creators of the violent video game Postal, the company Running with Scissors, over their use of the word “postal” in the title.^[1] The game’s makers argued their work had nothing to do with the USPS or its employees, despite the echo.^[1] Eventually, the case—USPS v. Running with Scissors—was dismissed with prejudice in 2003, ending the dispute.^[1]

On television, the phrase kept echoing in new ways. A recap on Vulture of a 2014 Brooklyn Nine‑Nine episode—titled “USPIS” in the show itself—ran under the headline “Brooklyn Nine‑Nine Recap: Going Postal.”^[7] In that episode, the United States Postal Inspection Service turns the old phrase on its head with a brass‑polished bit of spin: “going postal,” one character suggests, could just as well mean something benign, like “Maury went postal and brought in muffins for everyone!”^[7]

And then there is the other Going Postal—the one set far from any American mail truck.

In 2004, Terry Pratchett published Going Postal, the 33rd novel in his long‑running Discworld series.^[3] The book centers on Moist von Lipwig, a con artist forced to become Postmaster General of the crumbling Post Office in the city of Ankh‑Morpork and somehow revive it.^[1][3] It is a story about fraud, bureaucracy, and the attempt to drag an ancient communications system into something like modernity—not about workplace shootings.

Pratchett was, by then, one of Britain’s most widely read authors, with 45 million books sold worldwide.^[3] In late 2007 he publicly announced he had been diagnosed with early‑onset Alzheimer’s disease and later chronicled his condition in a BBC television programme.^[3]

When Sky One adapted Going Postal for television, airing it as two hour‑long episodes in late May 2010, Pratchett stayed deeply involved.^[3] He described himself as “the on set Discworld expert” and said he would sometimes “pipe up” to stop changes he felt strayed too far from the novel.^[3] He later said he had only “some minute problems” with the adaptation, which he felt closely resembled the book in both dialogue and feel, even though the ending and some smaller features were amended.^[3]

The production company Mob, which had previously adapted Hogfather and The Colour of Magic, handled the project.^[3] Executive producer Rod Brown joked that there was so much good dialogue on the page that the team “really struggled with cutting it.”^[3]

On screen, Richard Coyle plays Moist von Lipwig, the condemned swindler turned reluctant postmaster.^[3] Clare Foy appears as Adora Belle Dearheart, a character Pratchett once described as “a kind of Bogart heroine,” while Charles Dance plays the city’s Patrician, Lord Vetinari, and said he “enjoyed being mucked about by Terry Pratchett” on set.^[3] Tamsin Greig—whom Pratchett admired from the comedy Black Books—takes on Miss Cripslock, a “sharp, adventurous woman” role he said he had always imagined in her mould.^[3]

Pratchett’s Going Postal turns the postal service into a stage for satire and moral fable rather than a site of real‑world horror. The title winks at the American phrase, but the story redeems the mail as a place where an embattled institution can be saved, not shot up.

The People Behind the Phrase

Step back from the headlines and punch lines, and the scale of the real workplace looks different.

Between 1970 and 1997, the more‑than‑40 deaths at the hands of current or former postal workers were spread across at least 20 incidents—a devastating toll, but not an everyday inevitability in a system that employed hundreds of thousands.^[1][2] Later studies showed postal workers suffered workplace homicides at lower rates than other American workers, and far lower than those in industries like retail.^[1]

Yet the phrase “going postal” has outlived those findings. It persists in comedies, in video games, in recaps looking for a clever headline, and in the title of a fantasy novel that reclaimed the post office as something worth rebuilding.^[1][3][7]

For the people who died in Edmond, Royal Oak, Goleta, and the other facilities that never became shorthand, there is no easy narrative. Their names appear in lists, their workplaces in grim timelines. Their deaths helped mint a cliché that made millions laugh and wince.

The commission that tried to dismantle that cliché ended its work with a paradox: postal workers were, statistically, less likely to be killed on the job than other workers, but far more likely to believe a coworker might hurt them.^[2] Years of shootings and the words that followed had left their mark.

Language, once it lodges itself, is hard to dislodge. “Going postal” began as a terrified description of very specific bloodshed and became a sloppy label for workplace rage. Along the way, the people who actually sort and deliver the mail—the ones who still walk past security doors in Edmond‑like buildings every day—were left carrying the weight of a myth that was never entirely theirs.