Showing posts with label post office. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post office. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Postal Gardening Concerns
For those who have been concerned about the deteriorating condition of the three planters in front of the local post office, here is an explanation. The post office lost its gardener and the planters and their plants fell into the slough of despond with the news. However, there are new plants on the way and I guess a new gardener, although I did not inquire about the latter. But it is good to know that the post office still cares.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Gifts and OtherTransactions
Last month, maybe ten days before Christmas, we had a big power outage here in Point Roberts. Big, well, in the sense that it was cold and the power was off for hours...about 6-8, depending upon where you were. No power is always an inconvenience, if not worse, but this one was a particular problem because it was the very height of the Christmas mailing traffic, and the local post office has no independent generator.
It was daylight, so the post office people could see what they were doing, but none of the electronics worked: the scales that calculated weight and postage simultaneously and also printed out postage mailing stamps were not happening; nor were the credit card machines: it was a cash only business. Now this last wouldn't be the worst thing in most post offices, but up here on the border, it's a very different matter. Easily half or more of the people who are mailing packages are Canadian and they are not regular carrier of quantities of U.S. cash. Nor, since they were coming down from the neighboring Canadian town where the power was flowing freely, did they appear at the post office knowing about the outage.
By contrast, this was a good time for an American with U.S. cash to show up to do some Christmas mailing because the line was seriously shortened. I arrived with my packages and my cash shortly after 1 p.m. and was immediately No. 2 in line. Phenomenal! The man ahead of me me was describing to the postal person his struggle to get his packet mailed. He had been there an hour previously and discovered that his credit card was not going to be useful. He had then roamed around somewhere and found some kind of ATM or business that had sold him US$20 for a $3 surcharge. But now, as I waited for him to complete his mailing business--which was a small package heading for Europe--he discovered that the postage cost was $21.86. We all of us winced for him as we heard this news.
He checked his pockets, his wallet, looking for loose change, and turned up something like 20 cents. My wallet was already opened, so I took out $1.86, exactly, and laid it on the counter in front of him. He refused; I insisted; he refused; he offered to consider it as a loan; I insisted upon it as a gift, pointing out to him that it was Christmas and that it was a very small amount of money, in any case, so it wasn't a big sacrifice on my part, that I was happy to give it to him, that I was almost willing to leave it on the counter in front of him and drive away. He offered to mail it to me; I refused on the grounds that he would then have to pay 44 cents to mail $1.86 to me, and that was just silly. He offered to return it the next day to the post office and leave it at the counter for me. I would have none of it and insisted he just take the money, and finally he did.
I have never had so much trouble doing a good deed, and especially such a small one.
Then, yesterday, when I went to the post office to pick up the mail, there in the box was a plain, white envelope with 'Judy. . . Thank You. $2' written on it in ink and, in a different handwriting, 'This from the man you lent to." Inside the envelope, two dollar bills. So I made 7% on a month's 'loan,' which would be, I guess, a 125% annual interest rate. It left me feeling like one of the usurious credit card companies. It also left me saddened all over again as to how difficult it can be in this culture to accept a gift from a stranger, apparently because to be a recipient of an undeserved gift establishes some moral hierarchy in which the recipient is shamed.
It is also, remarkably so, a Point Roberts kind of thing. The man I offered the money to wasn't from here, but from cross the border. If he had been a local, I think he could have accepted it, knowing that he would, sooner or later and probably sooner, be offering help to some other local with one thing or another. Because we have such limited options in a lot of areas, we learn regularly to help one another: to give and to receive. You know that you are as likely to be a recipient of a gift as you are to be a provider of a gift. There's no hierarchy and no shame and not any particular credit, either.
It's a particularly Point Roberts kind of thing in another way, too. What other place have I ever lived where a guy could come into the post office a month after I/someone had given him some postage money, and the post office people would know who/what he was talking about and would deliver the envelope unto that patron? Amazing!
Nevertheless, there may be some other kind of lesson lurking here. I read today that Goldman, Sachs is going to require its executives to give most of their bonuses to charity. But what if no one will accept it?
It was daylight, so the post office people could see what they were doing, but none of the electronics worked: the scales that calculated weight and postage simultaneously and also printed out postage mailing stamps were not happening; nor were the credit card machines: it was a cash only business. Now this last wouldn't be the worst thing in most post offices, but up here on the border, it's a very different matter. Easily half or more of the people who are mailing packages are Canadian and they are not regular carrier of quantities of U.S. cash. Nor, since they were coming down from the neighboring Canadian town where the power was flowing freely, did they appear at the post office knowing about the outage.
By contrast, this was a good time for an American with U.S. cash to show up to do some Christmas mailing because the line was seriously shortened. I arrived with my packages and my cash shortly after 1 p.m. and was immediately No. 2 in line. Phenomenal! The man ahead of me me was describing to the postal person his struggle to get his packet mailed. He had been there an hour previously and discovered that his credit card was not going to be useful. He had then roamed around somewhere and found some kind of ATM or business that had sold him US$20 for a $3 surcharge. But now, as I waited for him to complete his mailing business--which was a small package heading for Europe--he discovered that the postage cost was $21.86. We all of us winced for him as we heard this news.
He checked his pockets, his wallet, looking for loose change, and turned up something like 20 cents. My wallet was already opened, so I took out $1.86, exactly, and laid it on the counter in front of him. He refused; I insisted; he refused; he offered to consider it as a loan; I insisted upon it as a gift, pointing out to him that it was Christmas and that it was a very small amount of money, in any case, so it wasn't a big sacrifice on my part, that I was happy to give it to him, that I was almost willing to leave it on the counter in front of him and drive away. He offered to mail it to me; I refused on the grounds that he would then have to pay 44 cents to mail $1.86 to me, and that was just silly. He offered to return it the next day to the post office and leave it at the counter for me. I would have none of it and insisted he just take the money, and finally he did.
I have never had so much trouble doing a good deed, and especially such a small one.
Then, yesterday, when I went to the post office to pick up the mail, there in the box was a plain, white envelope with 'Judy. . . Thank You. $2' written on it in ink and, in a different handwriting, 'This from the man you lent to." Inside the envelope, two dollar bills. So I made 7% on a month's 'loan,' which would be, I guess, a 125% annual interest rate. It left me feeling like one of the usurious credit card companies. It also left me saddened all over again as to how difficult it can be in this culture to accept a gift from a stranger, apparently because to be a recipient of an undeserved gift establishes some moral hierarchy in which the recipient is shamed.
It is also, remarkably so, a Point Roberts kind of thing. The man I offered the money to wasn't from here, but from cross the border. If he had been a local, I think he could have accepted it, knowing that he would, sooner or later and probably sooner, be offering help to some other local with one thing or another. Because we have such limited options in a lot of areas, we learn regularly to help one another: to give and to receive. You know that you are as likely to be a recipient of a gift as you are to be a provider of a gift. There's no hierarchy and no shame and not any particular credit, either.
It's a particularly Point Roberts kind of thing in another way, too. What other place have I ever lived where a guy could come into the post office a month after I/someone had given him some postage money, and the post office people would know who/what he was talking about and would deliver the envelope unto that patron? Amazing!
Nevertheless, there may be some other kind of lesson lurking here. I read today that Goldman, Sachs is going to require its executives to give most of their bonuses to charity. But what if no one will accept it?
Friday, January 30, 2009
Postal Going
On Wednesday, the U.S. Postmaster General went up to Congress to tell them about his financial crisis. Turns out, we’ve all quit writing letters and notes to our family, friends (and enemies, too, to include all the things we’re no longer sending via first class mail). We’ve stopped getting and paying bills via the post office, shifting over to on-line notices for billing and electronic transfers for paying. And many businesses and individuals have given up on USPO parcel post and leaked over to UPS and the other package carriers, and if parcel shipping is overall reduced because of less consuming, then even what little share the USPO has will be reduced.
And what that all means is that the USPO is in bigger trouble than usual. The kind of trouble that won’t be cured by going to 43 cents from 42 cents. (I remember when the typewriter keyboard used to have a ‘cents’ symbol up there on the number row, maybe a capital 6; why did it go and what replaced it? Here's the answer to that question; thanks, Miep!) What the Postmaster has in mind is closing the post office one more day per week. When we went from 7 days of open post offices to 6 days, it was because the religious community didn’t want to compete with the post office. Now, it is, like everything, about insufficient moneys. And, the Postmaster whispered, they were thinking about closing some of those little, tiny rural non-productive post offices.
Well, you’d think that our own post office in Point Roberts would be #1 on that list. And then you’d think again about all those long lines you’ve stood in behind the commercial mailers. And then you’d come to a different conclusion. It’s possible that Point Roberts’ post office is one of the big money generators in the country on a per capita basis, just as Point Roberts’ gas stations are probably the highest producers of gas taxes in the country, on a resident per capita basis. Down in D.C., they probably look at the Point Roberts post office mail and package figures and wonder in amazement what all 1300 of us residents are doing, other than writing letters and sending packages, day and night. Up here, we know different, but I’d think it looks good for keeping our post office on the grounds of its excellent money generating history.
And if so, next time you are standing in line behind a bulk mailer, thank him/her. And if you’re in line in front of a bulk mailer, maybe you should offer to trade places?
Friday, January 16, 2009
Cross-Border Cooperation
On Wednesday, I was at the Canadian post office in Tsawwassen to mail some Canada-destination mail and, to my surprise, was greeted at the front door by a 4-foot-high cardboard cutout of the charming nutcracker that adorned my U.S. Christmas stamps. The Point Roberts post office had the stamps, but not the 4-foot cutout. Bring them together, was my thought. But I also wondered, in passing, why the U.S. Christmas stamp cutout was adorning the Canadian post office.
Then, yesterday, I was at the Point Roberts (American) post office where I saw on the wall a framed pair of blown-up stamps with the same image: some kind of tall-sailed ship sailing in a blustering wind. Nice stamps, I thought, but why frame two? Looking past the image, I realized that one said 80 cents and one said $1.00; moreover, the dollar one said CANADA and the 80 cent one said U.S.
Aha! I surmised. These are same-image stamps sold on the respective sides of the border and one is the Canadian first-class postage to the U.S., while the other is the U.S. first-class postage to Canada. At the moment, the exchange rate makes these pretty much equal-in-monetary-value stamps. But how interesting that there is that kind of cooperation between the two national post offices, between the two countries.
And how noteworthy that that is where my mind went: amazing, the U.S. is capable of working cooperatively with another country on postage stamps. I daresay the U.S. works cooperatively with lots of countries on lots of small issues (and even some big ones), but that fact has become largely discounted in my life. So I was happy to see cooperative work once again and with no big and blustery notice about it.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Going Postal For Christmas
Update, below.
Today is the day when all my feelings about the Post Office sink to the lowest possible level. Indeed, the last time it was this low was 364 days ago, which was the last time I went to mail Christmas packages from the post office. The thing is, there’s this basic problem and the basic problem is not particularly complex but the post office seens absolutely committed to ignoring it. It isn’t the local post office people who refuse to do anything, though. At least my guess is that the decision not to address the problem emanates from somewhere farther south of us in the postal bureaucracy located in ROTUS.
The problem is this. We have a tiny post office here in Point Roberts, staffed by maybe four people at the counter. They have other people doing other things, but the people who take things from you and deliver things unto you at the post office are about four in number. And then take into account that there are about 2,300 private mail boxes at the post office. In fact, there are almost twice as many post office mail boxes as there are permanent residents here. So there are a very large number of people who are getting and sending packages at Christmas time.
We also have a lot of bulk mailers who, I am told, come down from Canada to mail their dozens of packages at a time from Point Roberts because it’s cheaper, if they’re mailing to the U.S., to mail from the U.S. Understandable; I got it. It’s okay with me.
But during the first half of December, in particular, the bulk mailing and the local package mailing and local package receiving all get too much for the little post office. And so we have the problem of one’s arriving at the post office to mail a Christmas package or to pick up a Christmas package, at which point one finds 15 to 20 people in line. This line is essentially unmoving because at the front of the line (which has only two counter positions) are two bulk mailers with their dozens and dozens and dozens of packages. They have special carts to carry them, those packages are so many in their numbers.
Today, I was in line for 45 minutes to mail my package. The bulk mailers occupying the two wickets took about 20 minutes each. At the peak, there were 22 people in line, about half of whom were there only to pick up a package. Now, in case the P.O. people have never thought about this, here’s a couple of suggestions:
1. How about having one line for the bulk mailers, defined as anyone with more than 10 packages to mail, and the second line for everyone else?
2. How about (if there is staff available, or how about making staff available for those 2 weeks) opening the parcel window door for a third line where people who are just picking up packages can do so (as they do for 90 minutes on Saturday all year when that’s the only service available at the post office)?
3. How about having special mailing times just for bulk mailers and other special mailing times just for non-bulk mailers?
The Post Office seems pretty committed to the principle “First Come First Served.” But given that we dispensed with habeas corpus over the past decade, couldn’t we dispense with the FCFS principle too? Or at least consider whether fairness and equity could be achieved in other ways? I love the post office and its staff here and I hate that they make me so mad at them!
Update: I am told by a local resident that there is an informal policy that bulk mailers are not to show up between 8 and 9:30, nor between 2 and 2:30. Not advertised, of course. It helps to be connected, even here, to actually get the whole picture!
Today is the day when all my feelings about the Post Office sink to the lowest possible level. Indeed, the last time it was this low was 364 days ago, which was the last time I went to mail Christmas packages from the post office. The thing is, there’s this basic problem and the basic problem is not particularly complex but the post office seens absolutely committed to ignoring it. It isn’t the local post office people who refuse to do anything, though. At least my guess is that the decision not to address the problem emanates from somewhere farther south of us in the postal bureaucracy located in ROTUS.
The problem is this. We have a tiny post office here in Point Roberts, staffed by maybe four people at the counter. They have other people doing other things, but the people who take things from you and deliver things unto you at the post office are about four in number. And then take into account that there are about 2,300 private mail boxes at the post office. In fact, there are almost twice as many post office mail boxes as there are permanent residents here. So there are a very large number of people who are getting and sending packages at Christmas time.
We also have a lot of bulk mailers who, I am told, come down from Canada to mail their dozens of packages at a time from Point Roberts because it’s cheaper, if they’re mailing to the U.S., to mail from the U.S. Understandable; I got it. It’s okay with me.
But during the first half of December, in particular, the bulk mailing and the local package mailing and local package receiving all get too much for the little post office. And so we have the problem of one’s arriving at the post office to mail a Christmas package or to pick up a Christmas package, at which point one finds 15 to 20 people in line. This line is essentially unmoving because at the front of the line (which has only two counter positions) are two bulk mailers with their dozens and dozens and dozens of packages. They have special carts to carry them, those packages are so many in their numbers.
Today, I was in line for 45 minutes to mail my package. The bulk mailers occupying the two wickets took about 20 minutes each. At the peak, there were 22 people in line, about half of whom were there only to pick up a package. Now, in case the P.O. people have never thought about this, here’s a couple of suggestions:
1. How about having one line for the bulk mailers, defined as anyone with more than 10 packages to mail, and the second line for everyone else?
2. How about (if there is staff available, or how about making staff available for those 2 weeks) opening the parcel window door for a third line where people who are just picking up packages can do so (as they do for 90 minutes on Saturday all year when that’s the only service available at the post office)?
3. How about having special mailing times just for bulk mailers and other special mailing times just for non-bulk mailers?
The Post Office seems pretty committed to the principle “First Come First Served.” But given that we dispensed with habeas corpus over the past decade, couldn’t we dispense with the FCFS principle too? Or at least consider whether fairness and equity could be achieved in other ways? I love the post office and its staff here and I hate that they make me so mad at them!
Update: I am told by a local resident that there is an informal policy that bulk mailers are not to show up between 8 and 9:30, nor between 2 and 2:30. Not advertised, of course. It helps to be connected, even here, to actually get the whole picture!
Saturday, May 3, 2008
USPO, Canada Catch Border Disease
One of the things that makes life a whole lot easier on the Point is that the U.S. Post Office provides terrific service. In a place where it’s pretty much impossible to buy most things locally, where it’s difficult to get to the ROTUS to buy things, and where going to Canada to buy things involves purchasing in a foreign currency or getting dinged an extra roughly 5% for credit card purchases (punishment for using a U.S. credit card in a foreign country) plus an extra 4% in sales tax (Canadian sales tax is now about 12%, whereas Washington sales tax is only 8.4%), not to mention declaring everything purchased in Canada at the border and having some things that cannot be brought across the border in any circumstances. All this makes the fact that you can easily buy things in ROTUS and have them sent to you via the post office or UPS very important.
I have never lived in a place where the USPO’s employees were more efficient, welcoming, helpful. I celebrate them every day. Recently, however, the USPO, in the larger sense, decided that anything in a rural/street mailbox must be removed within three days or the post office personnel will remove it and take it god knows where, as Nichols and May used to described bureaucratic actions. I understand this is not a rule devised for Point Roberts, but for people throughout the country who can’t be bothered to take their mail out of their mailbox on some regular basis. Point Roberts isn’t the only largely resort community in the U.S., so it’s not going to be the only community that is adversely affected by this new ruling. However, the effect of the ruling here is particularly pernicious.
Many of the Canadians who own property on the Point are here only seasonally. Thus, they are not here to remove mail from their mail boxes every three days. My sense of it is that most of them come by now and then in the off-season to check their houses, pick up their mail, buy some gas. They may have to get their monthly bills in order to pay them, of course, but there’s no point in coming more than once a month for that activity. Now, they will have to cross the border more frequently if they want to get their mail. It’s no use proposing that they get mailboxes at the post office, because they are rarely available for rent. So now, the post office is going to be behind an enhanced cluttering of the border crossing.
To add to the postal problem, the Canadian border people have announced that the USPO truck that delivers the mail up here can no longer pass through in the car lane. Instead, it must go through the commercial lanes at the main US-Canada border, a decision that will add several hours to the trip each day, each way. In addition to that, the commercial lane requires that trucks passing through the border carry paper manifests that provide detailed documentation of what they are transporting into Canada. A manifest that says ‘MAIL’ is unlikely to be what border people will consider ‘detailed.’ So maybe there won’t be any more mail, or maybe somebody official will have to think through both these policies again (or maybe for the first time, to be somewhat less generous).
Every week, every month, there seems to be yet another squeeze on us. You could ask whether it is just general incompetence that is dramatically increasing or, as a friend proposed, the government is thinking of getting us all to leave Point Roberts so that it can reclaim it as a military reserve, which it was up until about a hundred years ago. If I start going there, though, my first thought is that it could be the site for Gitmo II. Not so warm as the current Gitmo, of course. Not at all tropical. But at least it doesn't involve dealing with anyone named Castro.
I have never lived in a place where the USPO’s employees were more efficient, welcoming, helpful. I celebrate them every day. Recently, however, the USPO, in the larger sense, decided that anything in a rural/street mailbox must be removed within three days or the post office personnel will remove it and take it god knows where, as Nichols and May used to described bureaucratic actions. I understand this is not a rule devised for Point Roberts, but for people throughout the country who can’t be bothered to take their mail out of their mailbox on some regular basis. Point Roberts isn’t the only largely resort community in the U.S., so it’s not going to be the only community that is adversely affected by this new ruling. However, the effect of the ruling here is particularly pernicious.
Many of the Canadians who own property on the Point are here only seasonally. Thus, they are not here to remove mail from their mail boxes every three days. My sense of it is that most of them come by now and then in the off-season to check their houses, pick up their mail, buy some gas. They may have to get their monthly bills in order to pay them, of course, but there’s no point in coming more than once a month for that activity. Now, they will have to cross the border more frequently if they want to get their mail. It’s no use proposing that they get mailboxes at the post office, because they are rarely available for rent. So now, the post office is going to be behind an enhanced cluttering of the border crossing.
To add to the postal problem, the Canadian border people have announced that the USPO truck that delivers the mail up here can no longer pass through in the car lane. Instead, it must go through the commercial lanes at the main US-Canada border, a decision that will add several hours to the trip each day, each way. In addition to that, the commercial lane requires that trucks passing through the border carry paper manifests that provide detailed documentation of what they are transporting into Canada. A manifest that says ‘MAIL’ is unlikely to be what border people will consider ‘detailed.’ So maybe there won’t be any more mail, or maybe somebody official will have to think through both these policies again (or maybe for the first time, to be somewhat less generous).
Every week, every month, there seems to be yet another squeeze on us. You could ask whether it is just general incompetence that is dramatically increasing or, as a friend proposed, the government is thinking of getting us all to leave Point Roberts so that it can reclaim it as a military reserve, which it was up until about a hundred years ago. If I start going there, though, my first thought is that it could be the site for Gitmo II. Not so warm as the current Gitmo, of course. Not at all tropical. But at least it doesn't involve dealing with anyone named Castro.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Someone Else Has Mail
You may not be able to buy anything much in Point Roberts, but you certainly can buy it somewhere else and have it sent to you. You can have it sent to the post office or you can have it sent to one of two private mail services that are here. Today, I journeyed over to the regular post office to mail a package and then made an additional stop at one of the private mail services where I used to have a mail box because a friend sent a package there, not realizing our address had changed several years ago. Sure enough, when they looked at their shelves, there was a package for me. Unfortunately, it was not the package from my friend. Instead, it was a package my sister sent me three months ago. The mail service gets packages, but its job is not to see that you get packages. That package would be there three years from now, even three decades from now, I guess, if I had not inquired about a different package. (I don’t know where the friend’s package is: not here yet, I guess.)
It seems to me that, in the city, if a package came and a private mail service was unacquainted with the person to whom it was addressed, the mail service would return it to the sender. But it doesn’t work that way here. Part of the reason is that, because of the weak U.S. dollar, Canadians buy lots of good from the U.S., have them shipped to the private mail services on the Point as if it were General Delivery, and then drive down to pick the packages up when they arrive, which they know from the UPS tracking numbers. The private mail service charges $2.25/package for this convenience, and they charge it whether or not you have a mail box there. It is not unusual to see people opening their packages and then putting on their new clothes for the drive back across the border in order to avoid paying the Canadian tax that would be charged if the border people knew they were bringing back new goods from the U.S.
The private mail service people have become pretty crowded in the past year what with all the Canadians coming down to obtain their goods. The public post office doesn’t have quite the same clientele, although plenty of Canadians have postal boxes there for the same purpose. What the post office has that distinguishes it from the private mail places is Canadian bulk mailers. Since it costs much more to mail a package from Canada to the U.S., pretty much any mail order business in the lower half of Greater Vancouver can save money by driving their packages down to Point Roberts to mail.
I enter the local post office, a small place with only two clerks on the busiest days, with trepidation if I have to mail anything more than a regular letter or postcard. This is because if I go to the clerks, the line almost inevitably includes one or more bulk mailers with anywhere from 15 to 50 packages to be individually weighed and stamped. They never say, ‘Oh, you go ahead of me since you just have one package.” It’s a long wait with very little reading material handy.
All of us residents think the bulk mailers should have their own line or be limited to specific times (during which the rest of us will all stay away), but the USPO thinks differently. My heart sank today at the sight of only one clerk and (only) one bulk mailer plus 3 regular users in line ahead of me. Happily, Lisa came back from lunch and rescued the regulars in line.
Nevertheless, it puzzles me that a public agency, the USPO in this case, makes so little effort to deal with such an obvious problem that is a constant irritation to its local patrons, especially in such a very small community. A community where you’d think that community would mean that it would be different.
It seems to me that, in the city, if a package came and a private mail service was unacquainted with the person to whom it was addressed, the mail service would return it to the sender. But it doesn’t work that way here. Part of the reason is that, because of the weak U.S. dollar, Canadians buy lots of good from the U.S., have them shipped to the private mail services on the Point as if it were General Delivery, and then drive down to pick the packages up when they arrive, which they know from the UPS tracking numbers. The private mail service charges $2.25/package for this convenience, and they charge it whether or not you have a mail box there. It is not unusual to see people opening their packages and then putting on their new clothes for the drive back across the border in order to avoid paying the Canadian tax that would be charged if the border people knew they were bringing back new goods from the U.S.
The private mail service people have become pretty crowded in the past year what with all the Canadians coming down to obtain their goods. The public post office doesn’t have quite the same clientele, although plenty of Canadians have postal boxes there for the same purpose. What the post office has that distinguishes it from the private mail places is Canadian bulk mailers. Since it costs much more to mail a package from Canada to the U.S., pretty much any mail order business in the lower half of Greater Vancouver can save money by driving their packages down to Point Roberts to mail.
I enter the local post office, a small place with only two clerks on the busiest days, with trepidation if I have to mail anything more than a regular letter or postcard. This is because if I go to the clerks, the line almost inevitably includes one or more bulk mailers with anywhere from 15 to 50 packages to be individually weighed and stamped. They never say, ‘Oh, you go ahead of me since you just have one package.” It’s a long wait with very little reading material handy.
All of us residents think the bulk mailers should have their own line or be limited to specific times (during which the rest of us will all stay away), but the USPO thinks differently. My heart sank today at the sight of only one clerk and (only) one bulk mailer plus 3 regular users in line ahead of me. Happily, Lisa came back from lunch and rescued the regulars in line.
Nevertheless, it puzzles me that a public agency, the USPO in this case, makes so little effort to deal with such an obvious problem that is a constant irritation to its local patrons, especially in such a very small community. A community where you’d think that community would mean that it would be different.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)