Happy Festivus, everyone!
We interrupt the story in progress for that time-honored Festivus tradition... the airing of grievances.
This year's installment is aimed at the single thing I hate most about living in Newark. Is it the commute? The crime rate? The smell from the apartment downstairs, which my brother informed me the other day is pot? The lack of decent library service? From the way I'm setting these up, you can tell that the answer is "no," and you are right. Give yourself a pat on the back, and/or a cookie.
No, my grievance concerns the Newark branch of the United States Postal Service, and their dismal track record of actually getting my mail to me.
I admittedly don't know how much mail I've lost in the past few months; part of the problem is that it's rather hard to know what people might have sent you if you never get it. But at the very least, we're talking three paychecks, some legal paperwork, a CD, a DVD, some posters, and a Slytherin patch... and I suspect there's more that I'm forgetting or am unaware of. In the case of the posters, they were shipped twice. On the first occasion, they and a book were sent simultaneously; the book was hand-delivered to my door by a postal worker, but the posters disappeared into the void.
One thing that gets overlooked in the Internet Age is how important snail-mail is to it. Yes, you can now do all your shopping in your pajamas at 3 AM, but without competent postal service, you'll never see your purchases. Most goods are still tangible, and can't be transmitted digitally. When—as I estimate to be the case—one in every five items of mail never make it to your doorstep, you have a problem. And as the grandson of a postal worker, I take this a bit personally; they're supposed to be better than this!
There hasn't been any really good solution, either. When I was working at the almanac daily, I took to having major purchases sent there, but that hasn't been an option since November. Mostly I've just been rolling the dice, eating a series of losses, and getting increasingly frustrated. It may have been a visit from the Feds that pushed me over, but it was the mail situation that drove me to the edge in the first place.
Fortunately, this won't be a problem much longer, as you'll learn when I get back to the main narrative. Or at least I hope it won't.
Posted by Shmuel at December 23, 2010 5:20 PM