The US Post Office Diatribe The US Post Office Diatribe There are 3 really bad agencies in our government: the IRS, the INS, and the Post Office.
Congress is fixing the IRS. Really! The IRS has hired PR consultants and the consultants are earning their pay: Attitudes are being adjusted! Of course, with the Republicans in power, they may revert.
Congress was trying to fix the INS but 9/11 made this a lost cause. The following was written a year before 9/11.
The INS DOES racially profile. They will make you miss your plane as their stated purpose just because your skin is the wrong color or your native language is not English. They will not assist in alternate arrangements when they strand you 3000 km from home: time lost, money lost, dignity lost. They will actually tell you that their intention is to make you miss your flight. At least I am a man. Women have it worse: fondling me does not give them a cheap thrill -- I hope. I can name names and dates. Bush is abolishing civil rights as fast as he can discover them -- in the name of homeland security. I wonder whatever happened to the slogan 'Live free or die'? Mr. Bush is redefining 'free'. If you doubt that, visit an airport or inquire on what is happening to your state drivers license. But this is about the USPS.
Not to be confused with United Parcel Service (UPS).
The US Post Office is so bad that no one will even try to fix it. I put in 3 successive change-of-address cards. The first 2 reasons to refuse the forward would have never have occurred to me. They accepted the last one but only forward about 50% of the mail.
The only alternative is to get a post office box. If you get a USPS box, only the Post Office is permitted to deliver to it. So UPS, FedEx are locked out: if you have a Post Office boax and need a package delivered, you need a relative.
If you do have a private box and you change addresses, you can forget the Post Office forwarding your mail ever again. Their arguments for this abdication of responsibility make sense only in the context of complete idiocy.
If the Post Office agrees to forward your mail to a private box, one of theirs or even a new street address, you have about a 50% chance that it will arrive. Mostly mail is just lost or delivered to the old address: then you are at the mercy of the new resident. If mail is forwarded, it is treated as third class and may take 2 weeks to arrive.
Complaints? Forget it. If the person you talk to speaks English, the Post Office will not admit that you have a problem because the Post Office has been sent from God to serve you and as God's emissaries they could not have misplaced or misdelivered your mail.
Sooner or later the USPS will have worked themselves out of a job just because of bad attitude and incompetence. Ben Franklin was a good guy but insisting that the Post Office be defined in the U.S. Constitution was a grave error. The USPS is working hard to stay in existence by branching into the banking business and contracting with its competitors. The USPS uses FedEx to ship its mail but will not permit FedEx packages to be delivered to a USPS mailbox.
It is interesting that the verb 'postal' is now in the dictionary as a superlative to angry. Strangely enough it is the postal employees and not its customers to whom this refers. If the Post Office were run as a business and really considered us 'customers', we would not have the problem.
Last year I needed the USPS form that signs all my rights away when I send my mail to an MBE. The guy behind the Post Office counter never heard of such a form. They locked me away in a back room with the station manager (with the threat of calling the police) who insisted that the form was to be given to them -- not received from them. Since this is an official USPS form, I pointed out that in some manner, some way, they must provide the form to someone. Luckily the district manager was there at the same time and was intelligent enough to understand the logic of my statement. I was at the station because I could not find the form on the Web (they have since corrected that problem: forms are a first page menu item). So the next day, the district manager faxed me her copy of the form. FAX does you no favors but the original she sent was not only 10 years obsolete but was so badly scribbled on and wrinkled that the print was illegible -- and not acceptable to the Post Office station when I submitted it. Even my MBE refused to accept the FAX copy I got from the postal supervisor. I tried multiple other MBEs until I found one who had a current form and would make a copy for me. You would think the MBEs would be on top of this problem but maybe incompetence is contagious.
Then there is the USPS attempt to label the users of competitive mailboxes and further refuse mail delivery. Instead of placing a '#' sign followed by a box number, the USPS required the letters 'pmb'. They had flimsy excuses for this but the primary purpose was to harass MBE customers. The cost of this non-delivery threat was high as no computer addressing programs supported pmb. After a lot of flak to Congress, the USPS gave up on the 'pmb' requirement -- but you must use the '#' and not something like 'apt.' Sometimes I really wonder how they can be so arrogantly out of touch.
You pay a tariff for stamps at the MBE. Strange -- did you know that at one time you could buy stamps at a discount at Price Club? Sadly so few people took advantage of this that Price Club gave up.
Once upon a time the USPS sued FedEx and UPS for infringing upon its constitutional monopoly. The court decided that FedEx existed because the USPS did not reliably fill the need. To prove the need, FedEx et al were required to charge excessive rates. FedEx has been so successful in this area that not only have they continued to profitably exist, but the USPS is now contracting with them for mail delivery. This somehow rubs me wrong. The government should not compete with private enterprise where private enterprise is successful. That means to me that the government should bail out of areas that it finds that it is no longer needed. Conspiring with the competition is not the proper answer to the poor business policies of a government agency. And -- please do not confuse the issue with the 'spin off' of the USPS as a government corporation. When it issues its first IPO and stops getting taxpayer handouts and it is open to competition, then it is a corporation. With the FedEx operation, I figure one of these days that if I rent a USPS mailbox, FedEx can deliver to it but UPS cannot.
This is not a joke. The USPS has decided that it needs to branch out and has gone into the banking and phone call businesses. There should be a sunset law on the USPS, not enlargement of its abilities. If you know anything about finances on the Internet you know that there are Internet banks and Internet check writing services. All (for practical purposes) use the Checkfree Corporation for this service. Even Yahoo offers bill payment. Here is a place where the market is already full of competitors and the USPS is moving in. This is absolutely wrong.
In the meantime, I have discovered the Escapees organization in Livingston, Texas. They handle mail for thousands of RVers as a private mail drop. They have courteous people and have layered services at differing prices. MBE expects you to pick up your own mail on a regular basis. MBE does provide a forwarding service but you are at the whim of the local manager. I moved my address to Escapees: they never expect you to come to them and they always expect to send your mail to some obscure location at the drop of a hat.
Some nice Escapee person will forward snail mail addressed to me about 4 to 8 weeks after you sent it.