It was the headline above the news item that grabbed my attention. "Kinki postmaster fired for filming women changing clothes."

At first I thought it was a typographical error. The story was on the Internet site Postalnews.com and was datelined Hirakata, Osaka. I figured the Japanese headline writer had simply misspelled kinky. These things happen occasionally in the news business.

But it wasn't a misprint at all. Kinki is a region, a governmental unit comparable to one of our states. It's located in central Japan and is home to more than 24 million people. So the kinky postmaster was actually a Kinki postmaster.

But even more amazing than the ironic wordplay was the postmaster's response to getting caught peeking on his female employees while they were undressing.

The postmaster had filmed women employees in the changing room at a Hirakata post office for two weeks in August last year until one of the women found the camera.

The newspaper described the postmaster as ‘shamed' and said he admitted the allegations. It quoted him as saying, "I wanted to see women changing clothes."

What happened next was even more amazing, at least by United States Postal Service standards.

Kinki Postal Bureau officials fired the postmaster.

That's right. He wasn't transferred or promoted. He lost his job.

That's not the way things would work in the United States Postal Service if a lecherous boss was caught red-handed spying on workers undressing in the women's locker room.

Here, the first thing a boss would do is deny it. Or, if forced to acknowledge he'd installed a hidden camera in the women's locker room, he would defend his action by saying it was done for security or safety reasons, and then remind everyone of 9-11.

That response would be enough to appease his superiors. If there was a big enough uproar from his victims, they might have to transfer him to another post office or even give him a promotion to protect him.

That's the way things work in the Postal Service. Bosses protect bosses.

And for those of you who think I'm exaggerating, I would point you to the tragic case of Cynthia Stoll, whose story is perhaps the worst example of sexual harassment in the history of the Postal Service.

You can read a more graphic and complete version of the story on the web site uspswomen or the case at Cynthia Stoll vs. Marvin Runyon. But here it is in a nutshell.

A letter sorting machine operator at the Sacramento post office in 1990, Stoll was forced to quit her job after being sexually humiliated and harassed by her supervisors and other employees. The worst of the bunch was a boss named John Garrard who, according to appeals court Judge Stephen Reinhardt, offered her unsolicited favors "and then demanded sexual services from her as a quid pro quo."

"When Stoll declined Garrard's advances, he raped her repeatedly. Although Stoll was too frightened and ashamed to report the first rape to the police, she did report the subsequent assaults, and Garrard was eventually ordered to stay away from her.

"Garrard, predictably, claimed that Stoll was his ‘girlfriend,'" Judge Reinhardt wrote in his opinion.

The Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) who initially ruled on her EEO complaint "found this assertion ludicrous, and concluded that ‘there was absolutely no evidence presented to indicate that the complainant and Garrard were romantically involved at any time during complainant's employment.'"

In ruling in her favor, the ALJ recommended that the Postal Service pay her back pay as well as front pay - the wages she would have earned over the rest of her postal career had she not been driven from her job by the sexual harassment.

Of course, the Postal Service didn't see things the way the judge did. They agreed to give her back pay, but refused to cough up the front pay.

Stoll's attorneys appealed to district court to get the front pay and lost. But on January 15, 1999, appeals court Judge Reinhardt, calling the facts of her case "gruesome," ruled in Stoll's favor and remanded the case back to the lower court, where her front pay claim is to be considered on its merit.

Stoll still suffers from severe depression and other mental ailments brought on by her humiliation, harassment and rape and continues to be heavily medicated. Judge Reinhardt says she "was severely psychiatrically impaired." The administrative law judge says she was "obviously scarred for life."

As for her boss, John Garrard? He did better than the Kinki postmaster.

Judge Reinhardt, in a comment dripping with contempt, noted that the Office of Federal Operations "without any evident trace of irony, directed the Post Office to ‘afford EEO sensitivity training' to supervisor John Garrard, ostensibly because he had raped a Post Office employee."

"The manager received 3 hours of sensitivity training," says Stoll's attorney, Elaine Wallace.

"He remained at work, received his EVAs and bonuses, and even got higher level details. Nothing happened to him but the minor inconvenience of a 3 hour sensitivity training."

Three hours of sensitivity training for ruining someone's life? Justice is supposed to be blind, not deaf and dumb.

The Postal Service still doesn't get it. And probably never will.