Good riddance to the Post Office (a response)

In my first job out of college, I used to go to the William Penn Annex Post Office at Ninth and Market to mail reams of printed press releases after running them through my company's postage machine.

That was less than ten years ago. Now, at 29, the memory makes me feel old.

As Americans face the impending loss of Saturday mail this summer due to U.S. Postal Service cutbacks, Reed Stevens pines for the days when the post office was the place to see everyone in town. (To read her BSR essay, click here.)

But after reading her reminiscences of the nasty postmaster who slammed the window shut in children's faces, I'm not sure what she's so nostalgic about.

My own much more recent interactions with the U.S. Postal Service are less sanguine than Reed's.

My reading preferences

There are the nosy comments from my present mail carrier on the days I meet him on my driveway. When I renewed a passport by mail, he asked where I was going and why. Having observed my steady stream of book deliveries, he delivered his own judgments on my preferences. On one occasion he added gratuitously, "You're not really gonna read all those books, are you?"

This is to say nothing of the endless trials of visiting the Post Office building itself. I don't mean just waiting in a mile-long line at Ninth and Market because only two of about 16 windows are intermittently in service (while countless workers can be seen milling around in the back).

I could add the difficulty I've had mailing packages to my in-laws at the same office.

"And what country is this going to?"

"South Africa. The address is already written on there."

"Yes, but what country in Africa?"

Customer complaints

At a Post Office in Fairmount, when I wasn't sure which envelope was appropriate for international versus domestic, or for standard versus priority versus express, the clerk behind the counter helped by jabbing a finger at three nearly identical racks and saying, "That one!" over and over, a little louder and angrier each time.

Once I mailed a large, expensive gift book that never reached its destination. I mentioned the lost package on my next visit to the counter of the Elkins Park Post Office.

"The Postal Service. Does not. Lose. Packages," the clerk said.

"Well, this package was never delivered."

"Did you ask the recipient if it arrived?"

"Yes, I did."

"Well, that person lost it, and didn't want to tell you, or else it just got buried on someone's desk after it was delivered."

Bottom line: The customer is never right.

While the snow melted

Once, the interruption of our mail delivery coincided with a minor snowstorm that left a few inches of soft snow on our apartment building's 30-foot driveway"“ not enough to warrant the superintendent's calling a plow. At first, the next three mail-free days struck me as an inexplicable respite from credit card offers and supermarket circulars. But when our mail resumed on the same day that the very last of the snow melted, I surmised that our mail carrier had simply declined to take his customary walk to our front door mailbox.

The Pony Express it wasn't.

The Post-It alternative

My most harrowing postal interaction occurred several years ago when I shared a house with a few other 20-somethings in Willow Grove. We had one of those metal mailboxes mounted directly on the siding of our porch. You opened the top like an envelope.

Strangely, the postal carrier delivered our mail, but nothing would induce him to take our outgoing mail. I tried propping up the outgoing envelopes, or making them stick out of the box a little, since the little red flag obviously wasn't sufficient. When that tactic failed, I tried putting a Post-It (an appropriately named sticky note, in this case) on the mailbox that said, "Please Take Outgoing Mail!!"

But nothing worked. I began taking all my mail with me to work downtown, to drop in a city mailbox.

On Halloween that year, I tried an experiment. I put some candy in a bag with a note: "Happy Halloween to the mailman!" and left it in the mailbox. Things came to a head that day.

Sitting in the truck

Instead of leaving our incoming mail comfortably vertical in the box, the mailman had jammed it horizontally down in the bottom of the box with what looked like the force of a karate chop. Once I pried the scuffed and bent envelopes out, I saw the candy smashed at the bottom.

That wasn't the last time we came home to karate-chopped mail that year. Obviously, we had pushed the mailman too far.

Sometimes, when I was home on Saturdays, the mail truck would pull up opposite our house. I could see the mailman in there, just sitting. What was he doing? I could never figure it out from behind the curtains. Eventually he'd pull away.

Obviously I'm too young to appreciate the good old days before fax machines, e-mail, UPS and Federal Express, when the post office was a community center and customers had no choice but to hang out there. Perhaps, like Reed Stevens, when I'm in my 60s I too will wax nostalgic about the surly window clerks and karate-chopping mailmen of my young adulthood. But I doubt it.♦


To read a response, click here.