Who among us has not said to himself, "I sure wish I had a reason I had to drive to the post office, rather than using the mailbox at the end of the block"? Sure, the blue box is convenient and keeps you 6' away from any humans in this coronavirus era. But wouldn't you rather use gas to drive to the post office, waste time looking for a parking space, waste money on the meter, and have the chance to get close to other humans for no particular reason? Right, me too.
Well, apparently, the US Postal Service has another idea. This weekend, I had a few packages to ship, so I walked down to the town center, went up to the blue box, looking for the handle to open the shute, and...no handle! What? Really. Yes, really. You can now only mail letters from the blue box. For any package, you have to go to your local post office. Ugh. So I took the packages back home, got in my car, drove to the post office (accessible 24/7), and went inside to drop off my packages. Only to find that the package shute inside the post office was jammed because too many people (who, like me, couldn't use the mailbox anymore) had dropped off packages during post office after-hours.
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| An old mailbox with a handle that allows you to ship a package |
So back home I went again. With the packages, again. I'll have to drive to the post office tomorrow and deal with people, masks, and all the other things.
You might ask why the post office changed from the old-style mailboxes that allowed you mail packages to the new ones that only accept letters. Well, it turns out
that in a few places in New York City, people have been stealing letter mail from the old-style mailboxes. Just letters, not packages. No one was stealing packages from the blue mailboxes. But, as a result of a few letters being stolen from a few mailboxes in sketchy parts of New York City, the USPS, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to replace the mailboxes everywhere, starting with the Eastern US. Because a few people were ripping off letters from a few mailboxes in New York. You can only imagine how much this will cost and how this affects the bottom line of an organization that, like clockwork, complains they are running a deficit. I would not be surprised to find out that the company that makes these new mailboxes happens to be a close personal friend of whoever at the post office makes these decisions.
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| A new mailbox that only accepts envelopes |
I live in a very safe city outside of Boston, and to my knowledge, there has never been a letter theft problem. But now, in the age of coronavirus, the USPS is forcing people to visit the post office.
I'm not sure whether this is more annoying or pathetic.
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