U.S.P.S.

Further proof that the Federal government today does nothing very well. The U.S. Postal Service has been around since, when??? Ben Franklin's days? Is that not time enough to learn how?

Our town of Las Cruces, New Mexico (population 100,000) is only about 45 miles from El Paso, Texas. Now the U.S.P.S. is considering shutting down the mail sorting operation here in favor of doing all the sorting for our area in El Paso. The sorting facility in Las Cruces currently serves all of the zip code 880 sectional center, which is much of southern NM.

Okay, I am a strong advocate of the government saving money, but El Paso is in another state, and our postal service is already lousy. Will their service be worth keeping if they make that change?

We receive a lot of invoices from a number of vendors. Most have now switched to copying their invoices to a Adobe PDF and sending them by e-mail. Saves them postage - we receive their invoices immediately, in perfect condition, we can easily print all the copies we need and the PDFs are easy to store on a hard drive or on a CD.

Among our clients, one, who is not entirely up-to-date in computer usage, still wants our invoice in paper copies. We recently mailed our May invoice (which included many pages) to that client, in a U.S.P.S. Priority-mail envelope. He just phoned to report that he received the U.S.P.S. Priority Mail envelope from us... mangled and empty! Yes, we have copies, will reprint them and mail them again.

When we called the Post Office to complain, they shrugged... the contents of our mailing are just lost! If we wanted to recover our $4.75 postage, the client would have to contact the post office in his town, produce the empty Priority Mail envelope and file a claim. So advised, the client said to forget the refund.

So, thanks to the folks currently running our U.S.P.S., postal service is now lousy, and they want to reduce it even more. It would cost a little more to send our invoice to this client via Fedex, but it appears it would be worth it. The Federal government just manages to mess up everything it touches! Does anyone actually believe they will improve health care costs?