Saturday, April 25, 2009
Mocking the United States Postal Service
So, I received an email from a massive internet-related company that began with the following two sentences (emphasis added):
We've recently sent you a Personal Identification Number (PIN) via standard mail. You should expect to receive it within about 2-4 weeks.
Now, I know that it is fashionable to mock the post office, but is snark this harsh in an official communication really called for?
8 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Apr 25, 02:33:00 PM:
In defense of the USPS here in Nebraska. 1) Mail usually is delivered to or from Omaha (200+ miles) the next day. 2) Once I had to stop at a small town PO to weigh and mail a letter. I happened to arrive while they were closed for noon, but the lady inside, while eating her lunch, waved at me not to leave. She hustled around to the door and unlocked it and mailed my letter. 3) My Dad says that the branch of the PO he does business with in Omaha always has a friendly, courteous staff. Even at Christmas, they always have a smile for the customers. I guess it is just a different world out here compared to the East Coast. Disclosure: Neither I, nor any members of my family work for the USPS.
By 
Cap'n Rusty, at
Sat Apr 25, 04:04:00 PM:
I'd wait until I got the pin number in the mail before I commented about the snarkiness . . .
By , at
Sat Apr 25, 04:14:00 PM:
I had a job where I received about 4500 letters a year from the public, and responded to each - pretty close to 10K letters/year. In all that time I know of only a couple letters that were delayed by 2 days - a landslide knocked a train carrying the mail into a canyon. Everyone can adduce times when a letter took 7 days to get from Denver to Boulder, averaging 5 miles per day. But on balance they do the hell of a good job. Just imagine how they'd do without boxcarloads of junk mail.
By , at
Sat Apr 25, 04:33:00 PM:
Yeah, I wonder what decade they are talking about? After 15 years of hand drafting my letting is machine perfect. I hand letter the envelope, the scanner at the Post Office reads it and gets it on it's way. Most mail is delivered the next day and rarely does it take more than two. Anything that includes a bar code is going to move even better than neat hand lettering. The only things that take a long time anymore is articles sent with bad address handwriting.
By , at
Sat Apr 25, 05:25:00 PM:
I have used the USPS since I went off to college in 1948. I am not aware of a failure to receive a letter sent to me or a failure of a letter I sent to be delivered since. That is a better record that my ISPs can claim.
By , at
Sat Apr 25, 11:04:00 PM:
My brother's a Postie, and I've heard the stories of what's wrong with it for over 20 years. But for all the warts that go with a government bureaucracy that is based purely on time served and preference to 'diversity' to the detriment of anyone who doesn't bring it, you can still mail a letter for chump change and count on it getting there pretty quickly. The same postage will mail a letter to places where there's no question the USPS loses money to deliver. People whine when the price of a stamp moves 2c, and I laugh 'cause I always set my wife up to state ... "oh, we should start using electronic banking, or stock up on stamps", to which I challenge her and settle that for the max of 500 letters a year, counting Christmas cards, it's a ten dollar bill increment at best over an entire year.
If it takes 4 weeks to get your PIN, that's because the sender isn't mailing it until early in week 4.
By , at
Sun Apr 26, 06:44:00 AM:
And not only that, the USPS isn't evil, like Google is. (Although you've carefully crafted this post to eliminate the name of your service provider, we know that it is Google).
Last time I checked, the United States Postal Service wasn't helping the Chinese round up dissidents.
And since you've now gone into a business partnership with Google knowing full well the full extent of their evilness, we'll just go ahead and delete this bookmark.
By , at
Sun Apr 26, 01:58:00 PM:
And may I humbly remind the beloved TH, that mockery, even second hand mockery, can be unpleasant to a reader.......
