ABSTRACT
jim stanford had gone to Berkeley because his name was Stanford. If his name had been Jim Berkeley, he might have applied to Stanford. He wasn't related to either distinguished family in any case, and a lot of his life was pretty casual that way, and he dropped out, and now he had the dropout mustache and a place on upper Keamy in North Beach and a job by the hour at the post office. He could walk to work. At work, he walked and sorted. He started out as a third-class sorter, but worked his way up to zip-code plucker. The sorting machines were sort of inaccurate, so he helped them along, doing the good work of helping junk mail find Occupant, doctor’s bill find surviving patient or heirs, and only occasionally losing someone’s social-security check in the grinding gears of the noncomputer.
