The Post Office has a personality

There are over 31,000 Post Offices in the United States. The come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They are present in all quarters of large cities and stretch to even the most remote hamlets in America. The Unites States Postal Service is the most ubiquitous of any American institution.

Almost everyone has been to the Post Office. There, across the counter you will engage with a postal worker when you buy stamps, send a package, or expedite an important letter. You may find the agent friendly, helpful, cheerful or perhaps a little cranky or just plain bureaucratic. You know what to expect at your local Post Office. The have a personality.

It’s not just the Post Office personnel with whom you engage, but also the letter carriers. Those who walk miles each day. Most of them are easy to engage in conversation. We have gotten to know some of them. There was Richard who became known as the Mayor of Downtown Amherst when he had that route. He even came to the neighborhood Sunday brunch. Then there was Glenn. One day he stopped at our house while we both watched a bald eagle.

Let’s not forget about the rural circuit riders who deliver mail to the boxes along the road. In the  old days it was know as Rural Free Delivery - RFD, for short, as part of the address. The letter carriers had to know the people along his route. For the same stamp, a letter could go next door or it could go to the far reaches of Alaska.

The letter carrier or the rural mailman is the one public servant we see every day. It’s reassuring to know that when there’s a message for us, he or she will bring it no matter where we live. Nowadays, packages arrive by various means. But how many of us can say the we know our UPS driver, our FedEx driver or our Amazon Prime driver. Compared to those in the United States Postal Sevice, they are anonymous. So when you see your USPS letter carrier, say hello. Give your rural driver a wave. They come by every day. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Electoral College has got to go

Do you know how close Joe Biden came to losing the election? Terrifyingly close! According to the vastest figures available on line, Biden won Arizona and 11 Electoral votes by 10,457 popular votes, Georgia’s 16 Electoral votes by 11,779 popular votes, and Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral votes by 20,682 popular votes. Biden won these three states by 42,918 votes. Together they account for 37 Electoral votes which, if gone to Trump, would have caused a tie in the Electoral College and thrown the election into the House where Trump wins the majority Republican states.  OK, a tie. But additionally, if Nebraska’s single Biden Electoral vote from the 2nd Congressional District hadn’t gone to Biden by 22,091 votes, Trump wins. Or if Nevada’s 6 Electoral votes hadn’t gone to Biden by 33,596, Trump wins.  Under the Constitutional provisions for the Electoral College and the custom of winner-take-all by states, Biden won the presidency by a mere 65,009 votes. Imagine that. The loss of a ...
Read more

Election legitimacy needs a landslide

Donald Trump has defined the landscape for the general election. It’s rigged no matter who wins. He has questioned voting by mail. He has sent in his lackey, Louis DeJoy, a big Republican donor, to sabotage the US Postal Service which now admits it cannot handle a deluge of voting by mail. He claims the process is fraught with fraud. Fearing loss by popular vote and in the electoral college, Trump has undermined the legitimacy of the election. There are three possible election outcomes. The first is that Trump will squeak a narrow victory as the electoral college distorts the popular vote as it did in 2016. The second is that Biden will win the popular vote and gain a narrow victory in the electoral college. It’s in the states with close votes that the claims of rigging will be raised. In either of these cases - a narrow Biden win or a close Trump win - legitimacy of the victor will be questioned.  There is only one outcome that can set the republic back on course. That is a Democr...
Read more

The coronavirus and age

Here’s some data from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health as of August 3 as reported by the Boston Globe . For the population from 20 to 79 years of age, the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 ranges from about 1,700 to 2,000 per hundred thousand people. This means that one out of every 50 to 60 people in that age range has experienced a coronavirus event. By contrast, for people over 80, it one out of every 18 people.  The death rate from COVID-19 climbs with age regardless. At 70 to 79 one out of every 303 people in the Commonwealth dies from coronavirus; at 80 and older it’s one out of every 54. It is inescapable that the old folks among us are more apt to suffer from the virus and we are more likely to die from it.  I am alarmed at the incompetence of the COVID-19 challenge at the highest level of government. For oldsters, the risks of disease and death are much higher than the general population - and unacceptably and massively greater than the risks from guns or ...
Read more