Fuck You Post Office
- Details
- Category: Your Opinion is Wrong
- Published on Thursday, 21 July 2011 01:50
- Written by Tom Z
Over the past couple years, it has been announced that thousands of post offices across the country would be shutting down due to the bad economy. Just recently, in my home state of Connecticut alone, there were rumors that up to 3,200 post offices could be nearing the end of their run.
Many people called this a tragedy.
I am not one of those people. Fuck the post office. Fuck them right in their stamp-price-raising ears. Besides the DMV, there’s no worse place on the planet than the post office. It’s government run, so there’s no incentive to work hard or offer good service. The employees get paid $4.50 an hour so they don’t care at all. There’s always a line out the door and yet only 2 people are “working.” I use quotes because really only one of those people is working while the other one walks back and forth in the back room and pretends to sort mail. I see you back there motherfucker.
But the post office doesn’t just suck, it’s also obsolete. You need a postal service and mailmen, sure, but why do you need a post office? You can buy stamps at the grocery store. There are mailboxes all over the place where you can drop off your letters. Bills can be paid online. Larger packages can be sent more cheaply via UPS, or more quickly via Fedex. YouPorn has sent mis-delivered Victoria’s Secret catalogs the way of the dinosaur. The post office has absolutely no competitive advantage in the marketplace whatsoever.
You may think this is just a rant against the post office, but it isn’t. I have a point. Not surprisingly, since the announcement that thousands of post offices would be closing, there has been public outrage. People in Hawleyville, CT, upon learning that their post office would be closing, started a website and organized an online petition to save it. The place was falling apart, FYI. Even Congress has stepped in to debate the issue, taking a break from arguing about steroids in racquetball, or whatever the hell they do down there.
This is from MSN.com:
A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that more Americans would rather the Postal Service curtail services than seek a bailout or raise stamp prices.
At least, that's what everyone says -- until it's their beloved post office at stake.
No.
Another quote:
One resident told the Newtown Bee, "The Hawleyville Post Office is like Cheers in Hawleyville."
False. I was never a huge Cheers fan but I’m pretty sure there’s no episode where Danson stands in line for 40 minutes then George Wendt comes in to work with an automatic weapon and shoots the place up.
When I heard that Connecticut was closing 3,200 post offices, my first thought was, “Connecticut has 3,200 post offices?!?” Connecticut is an hour and 30 minutes across, and 1 hour north to south. You divide that up into four equally sized quadrants and you’re left with areas that are 45 minutes wide and 30 minutes long. Put a giant postal warehouse in the exact center of each quadrant, give every mailman a real car and have him start his route from there, and no one is traveling more than 28 minutes to get where he needs to be. You see? The government’s plan? 7,000 post offices. Tom Z’s plan? Four. Maybe you wanna go crazy, bump that up to 6 or 8. Hey man, whatever licks your stamp.
Why do we insist on saving old shit? I’ve just demonstrated why there’s no need for post offices, as well as a simple solution to cut costs by 10,000% while still getting all the mail delivered in a timely fashion. You know how long it took me to come up with that? Zero. Zero time, it took me. I made it up while I was writing. I don’t even know what I just said or what my plan was. I think it might have involved donkeys or unicorns or something. All I know is it’s way better than the current system and it’s pretty easy to implement.
Yet our society can never seem to let go of the past. That rat-infested building down the street? That’s a historic building, we gotta save it. The park where drug dealers hang out and the grass is brown? Thomas Jefferson once at lunch there, we can’t get rid of it. Smallpox? Bring it back, that shit was classic!!
I know that certain landmarks have a great historical value, and that people gain a strong personal attachment to places that bred their fondest memories. But those memories are done. My high school was restored a few years ago, but that didn’t mean I got to go back and fuck Katie Woods. It’s over. What’s done is done. And having something disappear doesn’t make it any less historically significant. Everyone still remembers the Macarena, even though world leaders destroyed all copies of the song in an effort to forget.
So why go out of our way to save a broken-down post office that delivers no value in the present?
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