[Posted September 9, 2011]
Bury the sacred cow!
With all due respect to my Alter Ego, Ben Franklin, why
is the post office still such a hallowed insitution in these days as it struggles for its last breath? Would someone, PLEASE,
tap those idiot Congressmen on their pointed little heads and tell them to just GIVE UP THE GHOST.
It's time for Uncle Sam to let the post office grow up and
put on their Big boy pants.
The post
office is one of those oddities which is technically not a government agency anymore, but government is still strangling it
with regulations, which makes it really annoying for the average user, which makes even more people use Fed Ex or anything
else. If the feds could force themselves to suck it up and take off the chains, there may be some hope.
I say
de-regulate it--bury that ol' cow--and let 'em figure it out on their own as a private business that's ALLOWED to make money.
Sure, people will lose jobs and benefits and salaries will shrink. Gee, that hasn't happened in America lately.
I say
let somebody like Wal-Mart take it over. They do everything well, AND they make money. I ordered an AC unit from Wal-Mart
online at their standard shipping rate, which was 97 cents! It arrived on my doorstep in less than 3 days.
Meanwhile,
I'll have to admit that most of the time I love to hate the post office. With a few notable exceptions, the postal personnel
I've dealt with is a nasty, bitter lot who loves to beat you up with their persnickety, inane regulations, especially with
packages, and the result is:
a) the package never arrives,
b) it arrives weeks later than expected, like
a month, so the zucchini bread is not only moldy, it's hatching,
c) it arrives mangled with a pristine label
thart says SORRY, SUCKER!, or my personal favorite,
d) my package stuffed with tiny Easter presents and an expensive
dress, shoes, purse, and gloves for my 5-year-old neice never arrives, although I paid for prioity shipping, tracking, and
insurance (I tracked it into HELL where it promptly disintegrated), and when I tried to turn it in for the insurance money,
they handed me like 10 pages of forms and they required reciepts for everything which of course I had a zillion receipts for
all the little items, so I just gave it up....Meanwhile, the clerk is looking at me like I'm a crinimal for even inquiring
about it, heck, for even walking in the door.
The daggone place is a DINOSAUR, but you go into most of these marbled
palaces and they are closed over half of the noon hour--THE ONE HOUR PEOPLE WHO WORK HAVE THE TIME TO STOP IN--and you always
forget which half hour they're open, so you wait or you loose again. The kicker is the post office is the nation's #2 employer,
with more than a half million workers, right behind Wal-Mart, which is #1.
Most of these places can't even leave the
lobby open until 7 p.m., and then some clerk standing behind the desk with her arms crossed watches you pulling out a mountain
of mail from your box because you couldn't get in on Friday before 6, and they were closed the next three days, and she hisses,
"You're not supposed to let your mail pile up like that! You should be renting a bigger box." And as you strangle
back the swear words that are burbling up, you pray that this woman is at the top of the lay-off list....
You'll
get a package back that has a local box number wrong, with this stamp on it telling you why it was returned, not even supplying
you with the box number, because they're not allowed to. So they've passed it around the office for two weeks before it comes
back and your payment is now late. Are they trying to make sure everyone has a job?
Is
it me, or do you find yourself standing in line while the clerk BS's with somebody and by the time you get there, you're biting
nails, and your by-now-blue face must be very telling, because when you ask for a certain denomination of stamps, he hands
you 62 one-centers that must be licked? And you wish you could lick HIM with your fist, but I digress...
Then
there are the rural mail carriers, who deliver the mail whenever they heck they please, and the day you're trying to get it
up to the mailbox, he comes at 7:05 a.m. before he goes golfing, and the day you're waiting for a check or some other important
letter, he comes at 7:05 P.M. after day out on the course.
They say it's the Internet and the retirement plan
payments that are killing the post office, but I say the smug, arrogant attitude of postal GATEKEEPERS who hate humanity are
the true murderers of Ben's creation.
It's a little bit like public libraries, of which I am the director of one.
Public libraries are not used as much, or in the same way, as they were even 10 years ago, of course largely due to technology,
but because librarians also tend to be gatekeepers who love their books and resources more than their patrons; who love to
chatize people with fines and overdue notices.
But I believe making the library a welcoming place that's about
PEOPLE and not collections, where customer service is tailored to the community where the library is situated, could be the
difference as to whether it survives or not. Wonder if the USPS ever thought of this?
I don't have all the answers,
but at our library, we're trying to make the place look better, cleaner, more accessible, and more organized, and we're trying
to listen to what the people want--DVDs, programs for young children, computers that work at a decent speed, whatever. You
can't keep doing what you did 10, 20, 30 years ago anywhere anymore.
I am considering sending out "patron
surveys" to see what people think of the library and what they want. It's a scary thought; they may not tell us what
we want to hear, but it would be a start. I wonder if the post office ever does this. Nah, right now, they're
stamping that overdue payment you sent with a "3-cent postage due" message in red. You should be getting that back
in, say, a week to 10 days if you're lucky....
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