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Politics

Postal Service Goes Negative on These Newfangled Electronic Mails

Katherine Mangu-Ward | 9.30.2011 10:44 AM

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The U.S. Postal Service is royally screwed. Mail volume is down, benefits and pensions are out of control, and the USPS is Out of Money. After careful consideration, they have decided to deal with these fundamental structural problems by…attacking these unreliable electronic communications the kids are using these days.

The new ads crow about how USPS customers "feel safe and secure that important letters and information don't get lost in thin air, or disappear with a click." Apparently these ads are targeted at old people who are still sorting out the whole single click/double click thing.

The first ad also features a horrifying montage of people jamming the paper delivered to them by the USPS into drawers, folders, accordion files, and decorative trays. Seeing all those dead trees hiding all over people's houses gives me the willies.

Also: How soon we forget. As Robert Cannon reminds us, once upon a time the Post Office was desperate to get into the email biz:

E-COM was a simple concept. The USPS would set up a network where a message would originate electronically. It would then be sent to one of a handful of participating postal offices that had terminals, where it would be printed out. The hard copy of the message would then be delivered to its destination—essentially in the same manner and with the same speed as first class mail. USPS launched this service in 1981.

The Postal Commission, the Department of Justice, and the FCC simultaneously freaked out about this idea, not least because there are rules against government agencies explicitly competing against the private sector. 

Well, the USPS would not accept "no" for an answer, tinkered with its network in order to weasel out of FCC jurisdiction, and launched E-COM in 1981. A message was priced at 26¢—and for each email message, the USPS was said to lose around $5….And by the way, if you used the service you had to send at minimum 200 messages. The service was one directional; if you got an error message, you would receive it in the mail two days later. When the E-COM messages were printed out, it would take two days more to be delivered. And it cost the same as First Class mail.

You know how this story ends:

Three years after service was initiated, USPS terminated the service and tried to sell it off.

For more on the USPS and its ad misfires, go here. 

Via Adam Thierer's Twitter feed.

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NEXT: You Can't Call It An Unintended Consequence If You Knew It Was Going to Happen

Katherine Mangu-Ward is editor in chief of Reason.

PoliticsPost Office
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  1. Jeff   14 years ago

    O Gee I never thought about the potential for my online electricity bill to get HACKEDZZZ

    1. db   14 years ago

      You know you're in trouble when Anonymous is paying your phone bill.

  2. P Brooks   14 years ago

    Three years after service was initiated, USPS terminated the service and tried to sell it off.

    I wonder what princely sums they were offered.

    1. prolefeed   14 years ago

      I thought it was hilarious that they not only came up with this crappy business model that anyone familiar with electronic mail could have told them was doomed to fail, but then thought that someone would pay them money for it after they lost a lot of money implementing this epic fail of a concept.

      1. adam   14 years ago

        Not to defend them, but how many people were really familiar with email in 1981?

        1. Brandon   14 years ago

          What they were doing wasn't email, it was centrally-located fax machines.

        2. Paul   14 years ago

          If you were in the tech business at all, you were familiar with it. But it was highly decentralized, and didn't look like what it looks like today.

          FIDO Network. Google it.

    2. Steve Chu   14 years ago

      The Department of Energy is very interested in this business model. Please forward to us your asking price.

  3. Giorgio A. Tsoukalos   14 years ago

    E-COM was a simple concept. The USPS would set up a network where a message would originate electronically. It would then be sent to one of a handful of participating postal offices that had terminals, where it would be printed out. The hard copy of the message would then be delivered to its destination?essentially in the same manner and with the same speed as first class mail. USPS launched this service in 1981.

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

    Seriously, that is all I did for about 30 seconds after reading this. This has to be among the most retarded ideas ever conceived by man.

    1. Rhywun   14 years ago

      With hindsight, sure.

      1. Episiarch   14 years ago

        Yeah, for 1981, it's pretty not retarded. But then again, didn't Western Union have this idea sown up already for about a 100 years anyway? Maybe it was fucking retarded.

        1. SugarFree   14 years ago

          The viability at the time was probably based on pricing. Telegrams weren't cheap and charged by the word, whereas this (IIRC) charged by the page.

          The real problem is if the expanded cost was worth the day or so it saved for delivery. And the supply and repair expense of dot-matrix printers on the USPS end.

          And the peer-to-peer technology relationship: If you are going to use paper mail and email, then you are probably only going email someone else using email.

          1. Episiarch   14 years ago

            The thing is, so what if telegrams charge by the word? What, you have to send War and Peace by telegram so urgently that it has to get there tomorrow? The whole point of "I must get this to you as fast as possible" is that you will pay for your urgency. Shit, I used to pay for a bike messenger to take stuff across town in NYC because I wanted it to be there today, in an hour or two, and that wasn't cheap. And I fucking hate bike messengers. I mean, have you seen Quicksilver?!?

            Dot matrix printers were cheap.

            1. SugarFree   14 years ago

              You are the one who compared them to Western Union, not me.

              PWN'D!

              1. Episiarch   14 years ago

                So you have seen Quicksilver!

                DANCE!

                1. SugarFree   14 years ago

                  Unfortunately, yes.

                  1. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

                    You know, I was using a terminal (Silent 700) at home in the late 70s, using a 300-baud acoustic coupler (it was my dad's--used it for work).

                    So maybe it was a stupid idea. The possibility of people having data access at home should've been evident even then, as a significant, if small, number of people already had such access in 1981.

                    1. SugarFree   14 years ago

                      Or in 1946... "A Logic Named Joe"

                    2. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

                      But it was happening in the early 80s, not just a topic of speculation. Aside from school, I had a Prodigy account as early as 1989, I think. Certainly by 1990, I had e-mail.

                    3. SugarFree   14 years ago

                      And you still use your busted-out, janky aol email for some things. aol.com, email for hipsters.

                    4. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

                      I sometimes have a conservative streak. I've had AOL since 1991, and I've kept it for junk e-mail and some other purpose. I don't use it much for anything transactional.

                    5. Colonel_Angus   14 years ago

                      I find it intriguing you say "some other purpose" instead of "some other purposes". You must have some very specific purpose for still using clunky old AOL. I am curious.

                    6. Ted S.   14 years ago

                      Why not use an aol account as a spam trap?

                    7. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

                      That's kind of my attitude, as well.

                    8. anon   14 years ago

                      1989 is not the early 80s

                    9. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

                      If you're addressing me, the point I made above was that the availability of e-mail and/or faxes to the general public was already apparent by 1981. Remember, many academics had some form of e-mail then, and a decent population of business people and government employees did as well. Hardly like the writing wasn't on the wall.

                      The truth is, the government is generally stupid about technology. Especially when it comes to predicting what may happen with it.

                    10. Colonel_Angus   14 years ago

                      I find it intriguing you say "some other purpose" instead of "some other purposes". You must have some very specific purpose for still using clunky old AOL. I am curious.

                      Damn thread limit.

                    11. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

                      Nah, just a typo.

            2. Paul   14 years ago

              Ahem... compuserv.

          2. Fatty Bolger   14 years ago

            I really don't remember 1981 being the golden age of telegrams.

            1. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

              The Post Office has long lusted for revenge against Western Union. In 1981, it looked like the time was right.

        2. jtuf   14 years ago

          The bottle neck in the Western Union system was the expert in Morse Code. If the Obama administration required that all internet transmission be delivered to computers in 1s and 0s, that regulation would employ millions of human compilers who would work as translators in every home and office.

          1. ChrisO   14 years ago

            Shhh. Quiet down, or that'll become part of the administration's next Jobs Program.

          2. Ska   14 years ago

            Even Blazinov was not immune to the temptations of Al Sweringen.

          3. R   14 years ago

            Umm....they pretty much are delivered to your computer in 1s and 0s. It's called machine code, and is how your computer works on a basic level.

        3. Amakudari   14 years ago

          Yeah, for 1981, it's pretty not retarded.

          My thoughts exactly. IIRC most people -- and obviously there's a huge generation gap here -- didn't have internet access until nearly two decades later. If they were thinking about how to leverage the technology they had to serve customers, this actually seems like a pretty logical step if the price was right.

          The retarded part here isn't so much the idea, but that the price wasn't right.

          1. Paul   14 years ago

            Again, there was email before people had internet access. There were these electronic "services" that you could either pay for, donate to or get for free.

            Compuserv, FIDO Net, etc. 300Baud modems, FTW.

    2. Samuel Morse   14 years ago

      It made me a millionaire--in 1845.

    3. Zeb   14 years ago

      Didn't they try the same thing in Germany last year?

      1. Ted S.   14 years ago

        Finland tried digitizing print letters and sending them via email, but I don't know if the scheme is still in use.

    4. CrackertyAssCracker   14 years ago

      It's right out of a fucking Dilibert Strip, I think.

    5. Gbob   14 years ago

      For the time, it's not a bad idea. If you had a computer with a 300 Baud modem at your home, you were mostly communicating to other people via BBS systems which, for the younger amongst us, was a local computer in a Sysops (system operator)home that would only allow one or two connections at a time. If you wanted to send a message to, say, someone not living in your area code, then you were out of luck. No real national network was really available, outside of Compuserve (which cost, at peak times, around 22 bucks an hour). FIDONET (which was the first service to be really connect to the internet from home) didn't really get going until the late eighties, and even that had pretty high pricing for the sysops to pay for.

      Others in this thread have mentioned Western Union. An easy way to send telegraphs from your house with no third party involved, might have saved the media for another decade.

      1. kilroy   14 years ago

        The month after I got my first computer in 1983 I had a $200 phone bill from dialing long-distance BBSs at 300 baud. My dad went nuts, even though I was willing (and able) to pay the bill.

        How things have changed.

      2. Paul   14 years ago

        If you wanted to send a message to, say, someone not living in your area code, then you were out of luck

        Not entirely true. Fidonet was initially developed in 1984. It was a completely decentralized network whose members maintained its integrity and hub-based communications. And no one seems to remember Compuserve.

  4. Colin   14 years ago

    Classic Cheers:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8cvyexFnbE

    1. Elizabeth Warren   14 years ago

      "Hello in there, Cliff. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?"

  5. The Other Kevin   14 years ago

    I really enjoy the irony of some people complaining that the Tea Party wants to take us back in time and that's a BAD thing, but other people (Post Office, Obama's comments on ATM's) honestly do want us to regress and that's a GOOD thing.

    1. Michelle Casings   14 years ago

      Going postal: Mail worker unions overload tea party group with more than 100 pounds of mail

      In what appears to be an attempt to overwhelm their critics, postal union members have sent more than 100 pounds of mail to a tea party group advocating for United States Postal Service reform.

      Donna Wiesner Keene of TheTeaParty.net told The Daily Caller the group receives its mail weekly, and that the onslaught so far has spanned two weeks. The first week, she said the union workers sent approximately 700 letters and delivered them in a box weighing 57 pounds.

      Then, this week, Keene said the workers doubled down on their efforts, bringing the total weight of the mail her group received to over 110 pounds.

      "I find the idea of the unions attacking a tea party group for simply supporting a bill that would make our whole country more efficient and that would lower the cost of the taxpayers' yearly contributions to an inefficient agency, is just outrageous," Keene said in a phone interview. "These union people need to be doing their jobs in the most efficient manner, and the Post Office needs to be losing people by attrition but doing a really good job of delivering our mail."

      "So, if they have time to write letters attacking a tea party group for supporting legislation, then they probably have time to have six-day delivery of the mail," Keene added.
      http://dailycaller.com/2011/09.....z1ZSHUateg

      1. one third   14 years ago

        Nice, a postal 'denail of service' attack...

        I just hope they don't try to send real viruses through the mail...

  6. gaijin97   14 years ago

    I was going to go learn more at the usps.com/mail link in the ad...but then I got scared about viruses and crashes and stuff.

  7. db   14 years ago

    I have a couple of friends who work for the USPS. I'm wondering what they would say if I asked them to use 1st class mail to send all the links they normally send via e-mails.

    1. JW   14 years ago

      I would have taken this campaign a bit more seriously if they had mailed it to me.

  8. Almanian   14 years ago

    "The US Postal Service - because no one's ever had their identity stolen by someone fishing through their garbage pulling out old bills and stuff."

    1. Abdul   14 years ago

      Flint--because it doesn't rust.

    2. Surly Chef   14 years ago

      Read some stuff on "hacking", rooting through trash is not only considered essential, it's often a favored method to gain clues to vulnerabilities over electronic methods as it's often easier, faster, and safer.

      1. Derp   14 years ago

        I think that's what he was saying. Tune your snark detector.

  9. Grumpy Old Man   14 years ago

    Flobble-de-flee

  10. Bean Counter   14 years ago

    I seldom have a month pass that one of our customer's checks either gets lost in the mail or shows up 2 months after it was mailed - frequently after they went ahead and replaced the check. I have yet to have a problem with EFTs. Just sayin'.....

  11. Number 2   14 years ago

    "The new ads crow about how USPS customers "feel safe and secure that important letters and information don't get lost in thin air, or disappear with a click.""

    Like the letter I once mailed to a client who's office was literally half a block away...and came back to my office ONE YEAR LATER marked "addressee unknown?" THAT United States Post Office?

    1. Bean Counter   14 years ago

      In what freakin' universe?

    2. Doug   14 years ago

      True story. Many years ago I received a letter, badly mangled, with a court appearance notice in it. The court date? A month earlier than I'd received it. Fuck! Fortunately my attorney had shown up on my behalf.

      Nice job, USPS. Nice job. :: Slow clapping ::

    3. BakedPenguin   14 years ago

      In college, I was talking to a neighbor who complained that no one ever wrote her any letters. So I thought I'd send her one as a joke (I lived in the apartment next door to hers). I put the letter in a mailbox at the end of the street.

      It took 10 days for her to get it.

      1. BakedPenguin   14 years ago

        I forgot to add - "I guess I should be grateful for that level of service."

        1. JW   14 years ago

          Now, pay your fair share!

    4. Number 2   14 years ago

      And while we are at it...

      In 1999, I had to serve a notice on a client's former employee who had relocated to Tel Aviv. I went to the Morristown, NJ, Post Office to ask what the airmail cost would be. The idiot behind the counter answered, "WE DON'T SEND MAIL TO ISRAEL! We're the UNITED STATES post office!!!!"

      In walked down the street to FedEx and have used them ever since.

    5. Michael   14 years ago

      I was pulled over a few years ago for narrowly slipping through a yellow and ended up getting hauled away and locked up for a license suspension of which I wasn't aware. It turned out that the suspension was due to my failure to report for emissions testing with a van that I had sold a year prior. Getting everything sorted out revealed that the emissions testing notices were arriving at one of my former addresses despite my having A.) updated my license every time I moved, and B.) submitting a change of address form every time I moved. Bang up job there, USPS. Honorable mention to the EPA and DMV as well.

      1. Zeb   14 years ago

        What? They pull your license because you didn't report for emissions testing? I could see pulling the registration for that vehicle, but the license seems a bit overkill.

        1. Michael   14 years ago

          I was just as surprised, especially since I hadn't heard of that practice either until that very moment.

        2. BigFire   14 years ago

          Not sure in other state, but in California, you cannot renew vehicle registration without smug test result after certain years/milage from a test only facility. Usually the tester just submit the result electornically to the DMV.

          1. Reformed Republican   14 years ago

            you cannot renew vehicle registration without smug test
            Is it a minimum or maximum level of smugness that has to be achieved?

    6. Nipplemancer   14 years ago

      My uncle got his invitation to my wedding a month after the ceremony. Fortunately he knew when to show up without the invite. He lived a few blocks away from the post office where I mailed it.

    7. Paul   14 years ago

      Like the letter I once mailed to a client who's office was literally half a block away...and came back to my office ONE YEAR LATER marked "addressee unknown?" THAT United States Post Office?

      Yeah, the same post office that now regularly delivers Cooking Light to my doorstep, addressed to a one Gladys [last name redacted] which is two blocks away.

      The first time, I was like, "Meh, another mis-delivery". The second time I was like, "Really?". The third time I just gave up and will start driving it over to her house. Maybe Gladys is hot.

  12. Scruffy Nerfherder   14 years ago

    I blame it all on that videogame "Postal"

  13. Bean Counter   14 years ago

    I seldom have a month pass that one of our customer's checks DOESN'T either get....DAMN OLD AGE!!

  14. Joe M   14 years ago

    Initially, I was going to say, "E-COM is easily one of the stupidest ideas ever dreamed up in the halls of government, and that is saying a lot." But then I realized the service was started in 1981, which is about a thousand years ago in computer time. The idea of printing and delivering e-mail is still pretty lame, but not quite as bad when you take into consideration that the vast majority of people didn't have computers, much less modems, back then.

    1. JD the elder   14 years ago

      That's true, but I'd be more sympathetic were it not for the fact that the Postal Service was still trying to push similar dumb-ass ideas as recently as 1998, when they proposed creating a permanent email address for every physical postal address. You figure out how the hell that was supposed to work, or why anyone thought it sounded like a good idea. Not much information about it is left, but there are a few older pages that mention it: http://lowendmac.com/musings/email.shtml

      1. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

        Their more recent push involved providing extra secure channels, I think, though I'm dubious about whether they could have done better than the private sector.

  15. Bronwyn   14 years ago

    Is this the wonderful USPS who lost one of the two packages I sent at *exactly the same time* this week? What did the guy do, drop one of them in the gutter on the way out of my building?

    1. Bronwyn   14 years ago

      "your important mail won't get lost into thin air..."

      ORLY?!?

  16. Doctor Whom   14 years ago

    I often get mail addressed to someone else living a block away just because that person's last name also ends in -son or because that person and I are getting alumni mail from the same university. There was also a scandal a while back when mail addressed to PO boxes at the main post office in my town was pretty much delivered randomly. I wonder how often that happens with email.

    1. JD the elder   14 years ago

      I think I can top that: We have gotten mail because - as far as I can tell - the house number is the same as ours. That's it. The street name is different, the zip code is different. How the hell it ever ended up with our carrier is beyond me. The city and state were the same, or I'd seriously have to start believing the USPS just sends mail to random places.

  17. Zeb   14 years ago

    Well, I'll just be a weirdo and say I like the postal service. I still pay most bills by check and I've never had a problem with their service. That said, their days are numbered, they are pretty much obsolete, and they definitely should not get bailed out. End the first class mail monopoly, privatize the USPS for real and let the market sort it out.

    1. Colonel_Angus   14 years ago

      Dude, how can you not hate checks, too? I let companies send paper bills to me, but I always pay them online with a credit card, which I use strictly as a debit card. Checks are for shit that's like hundreds or thousands of dollars when you pay in person.

  18. sevo   14 years ago

    Next USPS ad campaign:
    "Man was not intended to fly!"

    1. Almanian   14 years ago

      GET A HORSE!

      1. Christopher Reeve   14 years ago

        ahem..

  19. SugarFree   14 years ago

    They are just scaring grandma away from the computer. This is wisely-targeted marketing if you ask me.

    Have you noticed how many current commercials are about peeing your pants, or not being able to get it up, or bone loss? Old people are a growth market and they have tons of (our) disposable cash.

    1. Abdul   14 years ago

      Don't forget, Granny--you can't put a five dollar bill in an e-Card!

    2. Almanian   14 years ago

      You said "bone loss"....huh huh, huh huh, huh huh...

      "Bone loss"....

      1. SugarFree   14 years ago

        Sorry about being redundant.

    3. Gilbert Martin   14 years ago

      Yeah like all those ads enticing grandma with a free electric scooter paid for by the gubmit.

    4. jtuf   14 years ago

      Remember folks, don't trust anyone under 50.

    5. Sparky   14 years ago

      Scaring grandma away from the computer.

      Seriously, this commercial runs every 20 minutes on Fox News at night.

      1. Pip   14 years ago

        I love where she says that it detected a nasty virus. My first thought was, you dirty, dirty dog.

      2. oncogenesis   14 years ago

        Check out some of the related videos conjured up by the Google AI.

    6. Tony   14 years ago

      True, but I get hundreds of email message regarding erectile disfunction and I always wonder - How do they know!?

      It's freaky!

  20. Mozez   14 years ago

    I used to work for the USPS as a remote encoder (sat at a monitor and keyed address information for pieces of mail the computer could not read).

    All we ever sent were bills, magazines, and advertisements. That is all snail mail is used for anymore. And pretty soon most people will read magazines online, pay bills online, and get coupons online.

    It was really sad, because when I actually saw a rare post card I really wanted to read it, like it was some ancient artifact from a bygone age. That and the job was really boring.

    The post office cannot continue even with its monopoly on mail delivery. Not only does the USPS have no competitive advantage they have no business model to make money.

    The USPS is only around because of nostalgia and because so many people's jobs are caught up in it.

    1. Pip   14 years ago

      The USPS War on Drugs is only around because of nostalgia and because so many people's jobs are caught up in it.

      Anyone else notice a pattern here?

  21. Almanian   14 years ago

    Almost forgot this little gem when we bought our first house - and our monthly mortgage payment was found by some honest postal employee, lying in the torn-open envelope on the floor of the Dearborn (MI) post office. Said empl WALKED the check to First Nationwide bank next door, or we'd have missed a mortgage pmt for the first and only time ever in our lives so help us God. This was in 1993 or '94.

    We've been on electronic pmt ever since for all our bills. Never had a problem of any sort.

    So there.

    1. Almanian   14 years ago

      Come to think of it, I literally can't remember the last time I wrote a check to pay for anything - in person or mailing it. Been years...

      1. prolefeed   14 years ago

        I have a handful of bills that can't be electronically paid. I still use snail mail to pay them, because I can't be bothered to figure out how to pay them electronically.

      2. R C Dean   14 years ago

        I write about one (1) check a month.

        1. Gibby   14 years ago

          Four per year for me.

          Property taxes twice a year, safe deposit box, and my subscription to the Grand Isle Beacon (a monthly newsletter from Grand Isle, LA - I liked what they had written).

      3. T   14 years ago

        I write three checks a year, usually. 2 for property taxes and 1 for POA fees. That's it, normally.

        But I am paying my lawyer with checks. I figure a paper trail when dealing with attorney types is never a bad thing. Plus, he's kind of far away.

      4. Doctor Whom   14 years ago

        I use a check to pay my quarterly water bill because the water company still charges for e-payment. I also use checks to buy things at the Big Flea. That's it.

        1. Isaac Bartram   14 years ago

          I'm on county water and the county tacks on a two dollar fee for e-payment.

          I just pay my bill every two months instead of every month. Bills have to be over a month in arrears before they'll send an overdue notice.

          It's not like the dollar would kill me it's just the principle. 🙂

          1. l0b0t   14 years ago

            ^^THIS^^
            ConEd charges a $5.00 'convenience fee' for paying one's electricity bill electronically.

      5. JW   14 years ago

        1 check per year, if that. I usually have to stop and make sure I'm filling it out properly.

    2. Ska   14 years ago

      To be fair though, many businesses still use checks and not EFTs to pay the bills.

      Although this is also changing as banks support check writing less and less.

  22. Gilbert Martin   14 years ago

    "Also: How soon we forget. As Robert Cannon reminds us, once upon a time the Post Office was desperate to get into the email biz"

    Their big mistake was not putting Joe Biden in charge of the project.

    He knows all about them web numbers.

  23. jtuf   14 years ago

    The Post office should just cut back to 3 day delivery. Half the homes would be on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule while the other half would be on a Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday schedule. Then it could deliver mail with half the number of employees. It can still survive by going after mail that is important enough to justify the time and expense of a paper delivery, such as invitations and direct mail advertisements. Raising the price of bulk mail deliveries to compensate for the lower volume can be a feature not a bug. It would be like the cover charge at a bar. Some companies would be willing to pay extra for the exclusivity. Their advertisements would be among the few that a resident receives, which would make them more effective.

    1. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

      But jobs? And unemployed, willing-to-commit-violence postal workers?

    2. Mike Laursen   14 years ago

      Can it be coordinated to come right before recycling pickup day, so my junk mail can go straight from my mailbox to the recycling bin?

      1. Mike Laursen   14 years ago

        Better yet. Can they offer a service that delivers my junk mail directly to a recycling center?

    3. Colonel_Angus   14 years ago

      Mail day should be like trash day.

  24. Apatheist   14 years ago

    Ponies never break down or run out of Gasoline!

    USPS, Remember when we were still on top?

    1. Almanian   14 years ago

      Ponies break down. Didn't you see the new "True Grit"?

      1. Apatheist   14 years ago

        Not government ponies, they have unicorn ancestry.

      2. Pro Libertate   14 years ago

        The one with the Duke or the Dude?

    2. Abdul   14 years ago

      You never have to walk through a picket line to get to a wire hanger.

  25. Fluffy   14 years ago

    Fucking last mile connections, how do they work?

  26. BoscoH   14 years ago

    Reason.tv with a milk truck spoof directed by Ted Balaker in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

  27. Maybe...   14 years ago

    ....they can build a bridge across the Atlantic to Paris and use high-speed rail to deliver trans-oceanic mail at a great discount to FedEx.

  28. sevo   14 years ago

    Actually, the USPS does promote 'community'.
    In the summer when the regular delivery critter goes on vacation, all the neighbors get acquainted swapping mis-delivered stuff.
    As an added benefit, you get to see which neighbor subscribes to Daily Worker!

  29. P Brooks   14 years ago

    Maybe USPS could devise a system in which the mailman delivers a stack of punchcards, which the "customer" then has to take to his local Post Office and insert one by one into the reader in order to decipher the content.

    It could work.

  30. B?nzli   14 years ago

    They should also have mentioned that your local mailman sometimes fertilizes your lawn - for free!
    http://reason.com/blog/2011/05.....operty-and

  31. Neil   14 years ago

    Safe and secure. I can't tell you how many Netflix disks disappeared in the mail. One mail man was found with thousands of them.

    1. Colonel_Angus   14 years ago

      He probably had at least three copies of Timecop.

  32. Old Mexican   14 years ago

    After careful consideration, they have decided to deal with these fundamental structural problems by...attacking these unreliable electronic communications the kids are using these days.

    "These light bulb things, they will never catch on! Never! Why, candles are more reliable! You can always depend on a good old fashioned candle to light your nights, and not these despicable and unreliable light bulbs, what what!"

    1. Zeb   14 years ago

      My great grandfather (born around 1880) thought that this rural electrification thing would never last and insisted on keeping all of the internals of the oil lamps when they converted to electric. They're still kicking around somewhere, but we've never been tempted to switch back.

  33. Gibby   14 years ago

    Investigators: Postal Worker Buried Mail at Her House

    Mebane, N.C. ? Investigators said they would spend Wednesday night sorting through hundreds of pieces of mail found underground in Alamance County.

    The mail was posted to people in Durham, Orange and Alamance counties as far back as 2003, but it was recently found buried at a postal worker's home.

    Much of the mail, which included checks and carried Social Security numbers or other private information, had been burned, they said.

    Alamance County sheriff's deputies said they found the mail buried in two pits in the front yard of Gayle Wilson's house in Mebane. Wilson delivered mail for the Hillsborough Post Office in Orange County for 10 years, they said.

    http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/1457283/

  34. Gibby   14 years ago

    Michigan Postal Worker Hoarded Thousands of Pieces of Mail Instead of Delivering Them

    DETROIT ? There were jokes and snickers at a Michigan post office when customers learned that an overwhelmed carrier had rented a storage unit to hide thousands of pieces of mail.

    "I heard a couple of people come in and say, 'Can I pick up my mail ? or is it in storage?"' said Annette Koss, the postmaster in Howell, 50 miles northwest of Detroit. "We just didn't understand it. It's such a stupid thing to do."

    Jill Hull pleaded guilty Tuesday to deserting the mail, a misdemeanor. The case is rare but it happens: From North Carolina to North Dakota, carriers in recent months have been hauled to court for failing to fulfill their routes.

    Mail has been found in basements, garages and, in Hull's case, a self-storage unit in Michigan's Livingston County. In North Carolina, a mail carrier admitted to keeping junk mail buried in his backyard.

    In September, after she had failed to pay her bill, managers opened Hull's unit and discovered thousands of pieces of unopened mail, including 988 first-class letters. Some had postmarks from 2005.

    "I was unable to deliver all the mail," Hull, 34, said during a brief hearing in federal court in Detroit.

    http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,480985,00.html

    1. Hank   14 years ago

      In September, after she had failed to pay her bill, managers opened Hull's unit...

      Ohmygawd I hope it's because she mailed the check.

    2. Colonel_Angus   14 years ago

      My mom hoards mail after its delivered. I recently threw out like three boxes of shit that she moved with her from her old condo like ten years ago.

  35. Air Jordans 2011 Shoes   14 years ago

    Here you can choose more new products, enjoy more discounts, so you get favorite products while saving money.

  36. tn requin   14 years ago

    i think this is one of the best blog

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