The Post Office is Not Your Friend
My wife sent me out yesterday to mail some tax forms to our masters in Jefferson City. She explicitly told me to get a receipt. I decided to go to FedEx instead of the post office because, frankly, the people at FedEx are friendlier by orders of magnitude, and I will pay a premium for that. Plus I also needed to make copies of each form. Anyway, I had four envelopes to mail so I asked the nice lady behind the counter for the appropriate address labels to fill out. I managed to mess up two of them and had to re-write them, which took more time than I would have liked, but since I can’t seem to figure out the TO/FROM fields, that’s probably my own fault. Anyway, when I was finished with the forms, I took them back to the desk and handed them to the nice lady, who proceeded to punch in the information to the computer. The first one was fine, but when she got to the second one, she said “uh oh!” “Uh oh what?” I replied. She looked through the remaining envelopes and informed me that they would not be able to send them. When I inquired as to the reason, she stated that they were addressed to P.O. boxes.
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Sir the post office owns P.O. boxes and they won’t let us deliver to them.”
And that, my friends, is why the post office is NOT your friend. Because unlike naturally occurring monopolies, the post office can never be challenged, and if you try, they have all the force of the government behind them to say “screw you”.
1 comment
My biggest beef with the USPS is basically their Front-Counter Procedures. Unless you are in a very small town, the line (though it’s not really a line as much as it is a pile of grumpy people) is always about 15 people long, even at 10am on a Tuesday, and generally 50% of the cashier/teller windows are empty leaving you to deal with a disgruntled 30something with too much product in his hair and a weird tick that makes you want to reach over the counter and throw that ANTIQUATED CRT MONITOR ON HIS FOOT SO HE’LL STOP SNORTING LIKE THAT AND MAKING STUPID COMMENTS ABOUT THE WEATHER>>>>>>…. Sorry, I had to send in my taxes last week too. I try to avoid the post office as much as possible. I’m down to two visits per year, and for those, I try to find a tiny town in nowheres ville.