I've just about given up on the postal service.It was a good idea at the time. When the US Post Office installed Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General in 1775, there must have been high hopes, mixed with some doubts, about its feasibility. But for 233 years we've all relied heavily on the mail, dutifully paying annual increases in postage, adapting to zipcodes, then ten-digit zipcodes, faithfully dropping our letters in mailboxes. Bills, checks, love letters, poison pen letters, legal notices, Christmas cards...often their arrival was the important moment of the day.
And now it appears the system is breaking down. When was the last time you saw a corner mailbox? My post office in Arizona doesn't even have an outdoor slot anymore; if they're not open, you can't drop off your mail. The postmistress explained that "people were dropping unspeakable things in the slots, so we did away with them."
And even if your letter gets into the system, it could end up in the hands of a postal hoarder or dumper. Remember in the 1990s when it was disgruntled postal workers, shooting at their coworkers, that made the news? Now it's postmen who just can't be bothered to make the deliveries. Slate, the online magazine, in an article titled "J Crew Destroyed My Spirit," blames the breakdown on the daily avalanche of junk mail that inundates our mailmen every day. Instead they bury it, stash it in empty lockers or drop it off the pier hoping the tide will carry it off. And it's not just the US mailmen who've become slackers, it's happening in other parts of the world, too.
Since the advent of the railroads made it possible to efficiently and cheaply send out catalogues and other promotional material, junk mail has evolved into a monster that has far too many of our mail-carriers rethinking their "neither snow nor sleet nor dark of night" vows.
We've come a long way from those dedicated pony express guys.
If it were only junk mail, we'd shrug and write off the risk of carrier failure to the cost of doing business. After all, how many of us are holding our breath waiting for the next LL Bean catalogue? But separating out junk mail requires a certain amount of sorting, and some mailmen eventually can't even be bothered to do that. So bills, business letters and checks can go astray too. And those pesky packages...probably most are junk too, they seem to have decided. One fellow was even caught peeling labels off packages before dumping them, so that their senders and recipients would never be traced.
Here I should insert the proviso that the majority of mailpersons are probably just as reliable as ever. We hope.
This year we know of at least three checks that were mailed to us that never arrived. The senders told us several weeks later the checks weren't processed or cashed, and never came back, so it's anybody's guess where they ended up.
We don't use the Mexican mail system. But we had to give the IRS our San Carlos address and they sent us a letter once. Maybe they've sent others, but we'll never know because even though we have a mailbox on our porch, the mailman doesn't seem to know what it's for.
Remember Kevin Costner in "The Postman," considered by many "one of the worst movies ever made?" I've seen it twice. Maybe I find something fascinating in the whole concept of apocalyptic stories. Starting over from Square One.