A Few Kind Words about the United States Postal Service

Mack Hall




Bashing our practically perfect postal people is a recent innovation; until the United States Postal Service, nee’ Post Office, was dragged down by politics in the 1960s it was the world’s best, and on a local level it still is. The leader class in D.C. and the connected masters of the monster regional centers are not interested in your mail or the postal employees who actually work, but the nice man or woman who sells you stamps or delivers the bills to your door still follows the finest tradition of neither rain nor snow nor water moccasins.

For mail delivery from the United States Postal Service you do not have to telephone 1-800-BOMBAY and find yourself referred from operator to operative to obfuscation and back again. There’s a post office in the nearest town. You can within minutes rent an inside box for a small annual fee or arrange for rural delivery. You do not have to stay home and wait for someone to come out and bolt chunks of metal to your roof. The United States Postal Service has no interest in your roof.

The United States Postal Service does not lie to you. Can you say the same thing of your internet or television service provider?

When you walk to your official United States mail box you are not blocked by pop-up-in-your-face attack ads for fungicides for delicate parts of your anatomy. You might be blocked by the wide-load lady who bends over and spreads out over a block of twenty or so mail boxes while she slowly examines, one at a time, each item from her own box, but that’s not the postal service’s fault.

If you receive lots of letters occasionally, say at Christmas, the United States Postal Service does not charge you extra for them because you’ve exceeded some sort of dot.com.org.punk quota.

When you buy a stamp, that stamp will send your letter anywhere in the USA or to an APO. The postal service will not suddenly tell you that you have sent too many letters this month and charge you extra for the next stamp.

Unlike your ISP or satellite, the postal service does not shut down whenever there’s a little wind or a few drops of rain.

Opening your mail box does not require some twenty mechanical steps, the entry of two different codes, and waiting and waiting and waiting while a connection is sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly accomplished.

Your mail box does not disappear just as you reach for the letters inside, with a disembodied message floating in the air telling you that you must restart your mail box.

Postal service billing makes sense. First of all, there is actually no billing – you give the nice person at the counter a package or a letter and some money, and off goes the letter or cookies or First Communion card. The postage costs an agreed amount, and there is no vague, coded list of inexplicable fees added.

Anything you have entered into any keyboard anywhere exists now and will exist long after that really bad day is centuries past; any myopic busybody in the world can recover it and use it against you when you run for mayor or are vetted for a better job. The postal service, a good American institution, doesn’t care about some dumb thing you wrote in a letter during a hissy-fit long ago.

Your local postmaster does not spy on you while you’re on the keyboard. Do you think that someone else isn’t looking at you through the little camera on your ‘puter? Really? Don’t you read the news?

And the stamps are pretty!

Going postal – that’s really a good thing.