Coming to a Post Office Near You?

Coming to a Post Office Near You?

Dec 14, 2022

image This time of year, when I am selling my holiday cards, I happen to stop by the post office quite a bit.  I have yet to see in my lifetime a happy and efficiently run post office in the United States.  I don’t know about other countries.  My guess is that there has to be a country that has a better postal system than ours.  I am sure someone here will point out some rural post office in some remote part of the US that works well and everybody, customer and employee are happy.  Usually these post offices are in such towns as Buzzard Breath, Montana and it happens that the mayor is also the postmaster, doctor, pizza maker and sheriff.  The three people that come in once a month are cousins.

The post offices are designed to be depressing. How can they not be when the official color scheme of the US Post Office is gray and blue.  Not only conjuring up images of the Civil War but probably using uniforms from the Civil War for their employees.  I have not yet seen a stylishly happy employee rocking their squarish gray pants and blue shirt.  It is physically impossible. Put some beautiful person in a postal uniform and they would look depressed and ready to, well, go postal.

The buildings themselves are either old, austere temples to a bygone era when the postal service was the social media and now have fallen on hard times or a “modern” building, designed to wring out any joy you may have. These buildings are austere, with gray and blue laminate that absorbs any daylight and yet cleverly shows years of use, breakage, scars, scuffs and unidentified blobs of some alien substance.  

My local post office perfected the depressing chamber of doom by having the main door slam every time someone walks in. The clerk and customers instinctively flinch and duck each time the bullet shot sound rings out.

On the whole, my post office looks more like a prison visitation room. Your letter passed across a plexiglass shield to a person who probably would rather wear something more colorful, even if it was an orange jumpsuit. 

The humor is not lost on me that the Postmaster General of the United States last name is DeJoy. 

Yes, everything about the post office, employees and service have been DeJoyed effectively.  Even the idea of electric delivery vehicles for the largest governmental business in the world was put on hold because what is more depressing than a battered old delivery vehicle belching fumes, delivering you catalogs from places you’d never shop at or even heard of to begin with and delivered by sullen people wearing surplus Civil War uniforms?  

Anyone, including my dog Capers, would see that the US Postal Service needs a big facelift.  And it has to start with what they are selling.  The average cost of a stamp for a first class letter is now sixty cents.  If I were Mr. DeJoy, I would lower that cost to what it cost in 1972.  It’s a loss leader, sure, but that might bring in actual mail again.  

But perhaps people writing letters or sending cards is not the meal ticket it once was.  Perhaps the idea is not to have us mail letters, but take in the big bucks from catalogs and delivering Amazon packages on the side.  Too much time and effort to mail something for We the People. So you slap a price on a stamp that is getting pretty close to the cost of a can of peas.  “Let them eat peas” is what I can hear from Mr. DeJoy.  It could be argued that We the People have stopped writing cursive because what’s the point in sending a letter anyway if you have to make a decision between writing and eating?

The postal employees are not to be blamed for the problems at the Post Office. Once you start talking to an employee, you realize that most of them are desperate for you to know that they are not part of the problem.  Especially the younger ones, their nose rings quivering, staring bewildered like you, because  the space-time continuum has been altered in the Post Office. Minutes are dragged into hours and a line stretches uncomfortably far. The old and young stand there, clutching big packages, knees buckling.  There are no chairs, no water, no snacks and even no proper forms to fill out at the “proper form fill out kiosk”  as the hours drag by.  It feels more like voting in Georgia and probably those Peach State legislators got that very idea from the Post Office.  

At my post office,there is only one clerk taking mail and packages, while there are other empty registers where other clerks should be.  Where are they?   Why have these stations even there if they create the anticipation of efficiency, only to have that illusion yanked like Lucy pulling a football on Charlie Brown. 

Other employees are there though. Oh, they walk by slowly, as an extra on a movie set walks, not looking at you and sort of acting like they are supposed to be doing something.  Whatever that is, that something remains mysterious.  In the back, sometimes it will sound like fifty people are having a party, but up front the grimmest mortuary would have nothing on the sullen clerk forced to give bad reception and service. 

The other amazing result is that all work by the one clerk up front is done deliberately slow.   Whatever you have to send will require the time as it historically took for a team of monks to illustrate the Book of Kells. 

There is no such thing in the United States as a dash to the post office.  My idea is to strategically figure when people will either be eating or commuting and then go.  Usually everyone else has the same idea, thus all of us standing in line, feeling like we each are there for a turn on the slave galley oars. 

Yes, the United States Postal Service needs better buildings, better uniforms, better prices and better service. All the time I am in the post office, I daydream while standing in the line that goes nowhere of what I would do.  

If I was Postmaster General McCormack, the first thing I would do (after lowering the cost of a first class stamp to the price from 1972) is to get some pretty snappy uniforms.  How about an eye-catching teal and deep purple outfit with white shirts and ties for everyone? Or an electric blue jumpsuit with a US Flag on one shoulder and emblem of the US Post Office on the other? The name tag as big as they have on a Marine Corps frock perhaps?  Even medals for action in service of, well, good service?

The second change is that there will be music in every post office.  Live music.  A postal employee playing a harp or strumming a guitar. Maybe a whole gospel choir. They get paid extra for their talent. 

Ferns and other beautiful plants will be there around the koi pond and waterfall.  There will be real lights and not the whale oil lantern lighting. 

And a liquor license for the postal cafe is necessary. If there is going to be a wait, you might as well be given a number and then be free to belly up to the bar or order a sandwich at the cafe. Right there you have more than canceled any deficit in stamp costs.  In fact, you are in the black, my friend.

Once your number is called by a low seductive voice, you then head over to a state of the art sales-experience booth.  Yes, going to the post office should be an enjoyable experience. There in a sound dampened comfortable room, where you sit on a leather lounge chair, meeting your cheerful and happy-to-see you postal guide.  You get a small mechanical chair massage as the postal “guide” gives you the best option to guide your letter to Aunt Tilly.  If you schedule in advance, you can get a pedicure, too.  

Now, with a massage, a meal and drink, you’re feeling everything in the world is great.  Your purchase is made, the letter on its way.  A quick retinal scan assures that the charge is on your account. If you are happy with the experience you can tip your “guide” with a quick blink.  That tip then will be split between the guide, the always depleted pension fund, and paying for the postal musicians.

Once a year, there will be a national letter writing day.  Everyone has to write a letter, starting with the President and Mitch McConnell (he will always be around)  and send it to someone, just to remember what it is like to write and communicate. The postal delivery drone will whisk it to your doorstep like a message owl landing at Hogwarts. 

People will start wanting to write and receive letters again. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk might have to work due to the decline of interest at Facebook and Twitter. 

Perhaps dates will take place at the Postal Experience Cafe. Cheerful couples recalling the time they met over a Priority Mail and mocha.

The happily paid and tipped employees will want to make sure you had the best experience possible.  They will remember your name.  They will be your friends.  And if the Post Office can deliver your package efficiently, well, how about delivering you?  You can take a postal vacation and head to Cancun to write about your experience to a loved one, all done with the expertise and care of the US Postal Service.  They will make the airline industry fall to their Armani-suited knees. Your favorite musician might even do a postal tour.  “Coming soon to a Post Office near you, Taylor Swift and her Sending You My Love First Class with Tracking Tour.”  

Well, perhaps it is all overblown fantasy.  Anyway, who ever heard of a singing mailman?  I know John Prine never heard of one. 

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