The Heck with the Creed

The post office has no "official" motto, but for decades it is generally accepted that this is it:

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Well not so much around here lately.  We used to have wonderful mail service.  During the years when we were hosting foreign students, one of them, after returning home, sent me a letter addressed to "Mrs. Beverly, Davis, CA."  It got delivered to me.

Around that same time we had put a hold on our mail while we were on vacation and when I went in to pick it up, the clerk at the desk (all the positions were filled then) turned to the clerk to whom I was speaking and gave him my address before I could give it myself.  He had been our mailman for several years before changing to work in the post office itself.

These were the wonderful things about living in a small town.,

I suppose the first indication that things were changing was when I wrote a letter to one of the big name stores (probably Longs, where I did a lot of shopping) in the mall just a few blocks from our house.  I addressed it to "Longs, Sycamore Dr. and Covell Blvd, Davis, CA" and it was returned for a bad address.  Who knew mall shops had individual addresses?

That was when I discovered that sorting of the mail was now being done in Sacramento and since there were two Longs in town, one at each end of Covell Blvd, the Sacramento post office didn't have a clue where Sycamore Dr. was.

But once I learned that, things went on pretty much as they always had.  Our mail was delivered around 10 a.m. every day.  Then the mail started coming in the middle of the afternoon, which it has done for several years now.

Recently it was 6 p.m. and our mail had not come.  Never in our 43 years in this town have we not had a mail delivery, even if it's only junk mail.  In fact, there is a junk mailer that is delivered every single day.  The same type of mailer.  I don't really know what's in it because I throw it out without looking at it.  But on this day, we didn't even get the junk mailer.

Finally around 9 p.m the mail arrived.  The postal carrier had to use a flashlight to find the houses.

We figured it was a special circumstance, it being December and maybe the post office was overwhelmed.  But it was very late the next night and the night after that and now we regular get our mail around 6 p.m.

We belong to Next Door, an on-line group that allows members of various neighborhoods to communicate with each other.  I decided to toss out the question of whether others have been having the same postal problems that we have been.

I got a flood of responses, everything from "yes, the dirty bums, why can't they deliver our mail on time" kinds of answers to "they are overworked, be patient with them" kinds of responses.  Someone said that, right before the Christmas rush, they had laid off employees, so at the busiest time of year they were short staffed.

Today there is another round on Nextdoor called "Lousy Mail Service continues." with  11 neighbors comparing stories about undelivered mail, mis-delivered

Our delivery service is sporadic--and I am not referring simply to time of delivery. Our mail has been arriving at the home of our next door neighbor, we've been getting mail for neighbors on adjacent streets, etc. We have several different delivery persons. I have no idea what is going on.

Thankfully our nice neighbor on A street brought our misdelivered package over this morning. Unfortunately, since it was delivered to their house so late last night it sat in the rain overnight. This isn't the first time we have had this happen.

The best comment, though, came from a guy who decided to contact the postmaster. The guy tried mailing the letter, but it was returned for a bad address.  So he decided to hand deliver it and drove to the post office, handed it to a clerk who promised she would put it on the postmaster's desk. Two weeks later it was returned to him marked "insufficient address."  He said he thought "Davis Postmaster" would have been sufficient when he had hand delivered it to the correct address!!!

The post office is no longer fully staffed any more. You're lucky if two clerks are working and I have seen one of them go on break with the line of customers going out the door.  Nobody cares, it seems.

Very sad to see this happen to the noble institution for which my father worked for his entire career.

I Lost my Zen

I lost my Zen today.  Now, I don't really know a thing about Zen, but I use it to refer to the state of peace I can get myself into while waiting in line or when caught in heavy traffic.  I decided at one point several years ago that it really didn't make a difference if I was a little late or if it took a little longer to check out at the supermarket.  

That change in mental attitude has made me a much happier, much more relaxed person.

Mostly it works.

Sometimes it doesn't.

Today it didn't.

If there is any place in Davis which is likely to get me to lose my Zen, it's not the DMV (which I know does a lot of people in), it's the post office.

We have this lovely post office

And usually, I don't have a complaint.  The clerks are nice and efficient, but sometimes the office policy makes me want to...well...go postal.  Today I was so upset I didn't even take pictures.  (How's that!)

When I got there it was a zoo.  It was wall to wall people.  There were two lines forming, one for passports, a group that appeared to be a very large extended family, including Grandma in a wheelchair and two toddlers lying on the floor playing video games and blocking everybody's way.

On the other side of this very small space was a line that stretched out into the lobby.  We were the people who needed to see clerks.  The passport guy usually takes care of people who don't need to pay for postage but who are, for example, picking up vacation mail or dropping off vacation holds or something like that.  But passport guy was going to be involved with the passport people for a very long time, so that made the clerk people line even longer.

In between the long lines, wending his way around the toddlers, was a kid asking questions.  Now this is the most useless job in the post office.  Some clerk (who could be more efficiently used in actually manning a station) takes a clipboard and asks you all the questions.  You can have one very thin envelope in your hand and you have to answer whether or not you have anything liquid or hazardous like batteries in the envelope.  There are four categories to click off, starting with what's in your pouch, if you need stamps or any other thing to purchase, if you want additional proof of delivery, and if you want to rent a box.  This would be fine (if annoying) if it actually helps the clerk.  But when you finally get to the window, you hand this carefully filled out form to the clerk...and she asks you the SAME questions all over again. I can only assume that this is busy work for a clerk.  

And today the young guy doing it was a new face to me and, I assume new to the post office since he had to keep interrupting the working clerks to ask them questions.

There are, I believe, 7 or 8 stations and there were 3 clerks working.  One, a very nice lady whose first language is Spanish was dealing with what I assume was a very nice couple whose first language was Japanese.  The transaction was going on when I got there and still going on when I left a long time later.  So that essentially left her out as a potential clerk.

Another clerk was in the middle of a very long and complicated transaction with the guy in front of me, while the third clerk was chatting pleasantly with another guy.  The guy in front of me was finishing up and I expected to be next, but as soon as he left, the clerk put up a "next window" sign and left.  This left only TWO clerks working, one of whom was still dealing with the Spanish-Japanese transaction.

By this time the line was even longer.  I tried to make my transaction quick, but first I had to answer all the questions that were on the slip of paper I had just handed her, to make things go more quickly and more smoothly.

My own transaction took only a couple of minutes and then I was back in the car, flashing a sympathetic look at the people at the back of the line. (My clerk had just announced she was going to lunch, so now there was ONE clerk for all those people)

I have been dealing with the post office my whole life and I have never had a consistently good experience, though I admit it has been better lately.  Usually I "Zen-it," but today it got to me and I admit to huffing impatiently a couple of times.

The Skies the Limit

Facebook just started a new group (I think they start about 100 a day) for "People Who Always Have To Spell Their Names For Other People." It already has 548,756 members.

I've been spelling my name all my life. You cannot believe how many people cannot spell "Beverly." All throughout my life at home, I was constantly asked if it was "ly" or "ley." The best day, though was when I was shopping at The Emporium in San Francisco and someone asked me how to spell "West." (Gee. I dunno. What are my options?)

I should have known that I was asking for trouble when I took Walt's name. I never realized that my name would not be "Bev Sykes" but "Bev Sykes S-Y-K-E-S." I don't even think about it any more. I just automatically say and then spell my name.

I suppose that I'm glad I never married our Ukranian friend, David's godfather Andrij. All those years we were at the Newman Center in Berkeley whenever we went out to eat in a group, we always gave his name - Hornjatkewyc - even if he wasn't with us. We laughed watching the host or hostess trying to pronounce that name (horn-yacht-KAY-vich. Sorta. Remember to roll the "r.") One creative hostess at the Pancake House just gave up and called for "Mr. Horn."

As accustomed as I am to saying and spelling my name, I certainly never envisioned an entire lifetime of being called Mrs. Skies. It boggles my mind that someone can look at the name sYkes and think it is pronounced "Skies." But I'll bet that 90% of people contacting me for the first time make that mistake.

I hereby apologize to our children and my daughters-in-law for doing that to them. I shoulda only had girls who had a fighting chance to finding someone whose name they would like to take as their own!

---

Curmudgeon Andy Rooney was railing at the US Postal Service on 60 Minutes tonight, pointing out how many post offices have closed in the past five years vs. how much the population has grown and what a terrible, unacceptable thing that is.

The post office has been a huge part of my life, with my father's working the mail on the train from San Francisco to Los Angeles for almost all of his career, certainly for all the years I lived at home.

I also had a fond spot in my heart for the mailman. We were the third house on his route, after he took the bus from Rincon Annex. I would sit in the window of the flat and watch for the mailman to get off the bus and start down the hill, and hope there was something in his magic bag for me. Christmas time was the best because they would deliver mail 2-3 times a day. I corresponded regularly with Peach and with some penpals I had in England.

When we moved to Davis and had foreign students living with us, I knew my mailman and was told that I received more foreign mail than anybody in Davis (quite a thing to say in a town with a University!).

But over the years we have seen a decline in postal service (where once I received a letter addressed to "Mrs. Beverly, Davis, CA" now I can't mail a letter to a prominent business in a mall 5 blocks away from here, just using the business name and the cross streets!) and a regular increase in postage to where it is ridiculously expensive to mail Christmas cards.

E-mail has changed how people think about communication. If I send a letter to my next door neighbor it may take a week to be delivered because it has to go to Sacramento to be sorted. If I e-mail something to Peggy, 9,000 miles away, it will be delivered in seconds. And it's free.

There will always be a need for some sort of postal service, I suppose, but I feel no pangs over the difficulties that the USPS finds itself in. It tells us every year that it is in such debt that it has to raise rates to mail a letter, and then tells us that it has to cut back on services.

Paying more for less makes no sense to me just to keep the postal service alive.

And no matter how much Andy Rooney prefers "a real letter" to e-mail, I'm afraid that the world has moved beyond that and those happy times that I remember too, are definitely a thing of the past.

Hey, Mr. Postman

"The post office will run out of money this year unless it gets help, Postmaster General John Potter told Congress on Wednesday as he sought permission to cut delivery to five days a week.

"We are facing losses of historic proportion. Our situation is critical," Potter told a House panel.

The agency lost $2.8 billion last year and is looking at much larger losses this year. Reducing mail delivery from six days to five days a week could save $3.5 billion annually, Potter said.

I'm always interested in post office stories because the post office has been central to my life, since my father worked for the post office for some 30 or so years. He worked the mail on the train in a car like this:

When they took the mail off of the trains and on to big trucks, my father moved into the main post office to work, and had a nervous breakdown because he couldn't handle the change. I'm not sure how long he worked there, but he retired as soon as he could.

I've always been a mail junkie. As a kid I had penpals in England and lived for letters from my new friends. I also wrote to Peach frequently and I'm sure other people as well because I lived for the mail delivery each day. We were the third house on the route. You could sit in the bay window of our flat and watch the mailman get off the bus at the top of the hill and then make his way down the hill to our house.

Christmas was great. We frequently had two mail deliveries a day and as it got closer to Christmas and the volume of mail increased we might have three mail deliveries for a day or two. (In contrast, Christmas was the worst time of the year for my father, who detested the whole month of December because he had to work harder and was exhausted most of the month.)

As I grew up, the mail delivery was still a very important part of my day. I "adopted" a girl from Korea and heard from Foster Parents Plan about her each month. I continued to write to friends who lived at a distance and though I was the bane of everyone's existence because I responded by return mail (and nobody else did), I was quick to tell people that I didn't expect them to be as compulsive about mail as I was, I just appreciated their writing to me at all.

When we had foreign students here, I stayed in touch with most of them for years (now there are only a handful that I still have information about ). There was a time when our long-term mailman got a letter addressed to "Mrs. Beverly, Davis, CA" and knew where to deliver it. He told me we got more international mail than anybody in town.

During my Lamplighter years, my friend Phil Dethlefsen was in and out of the hospital for awhile and suffering from mental problems for a long time after that. I got into the habit of writing to him once or twice a day, and eventually I started sending letters in blue envelopes, so that I would buy them by the case. When he went on vacation, he would give me the address of his hotel so I could continue to write to him. As the price of postage began to rise, I always questioned whether it was worth it.

I always made my big contribution to the post office at Christmas time. It was not unusual for us to send out 200 Christmas cards, and as the price of stamps rose, it became a not-insignificant cost each year, especially when you added the cost of cards and the cost of printing the annual Christmas letter. Yet, to start cutting and slashing my Christmas card list seemed cruel. I really enjoyed communicating with so many people each year. I just gritted my teeth and bought the stamps.

Enter the internet! And most of my closest friends having e-mail accounts. There was little need to write actual letters any more when you could get a message there faster and for little to no cost. Obviously a host of others started doing the same thing. The post office reacted by raising the cost of postage stamps, which just solidified our resolve to use the free mail at our fingertips.

I must admit that I still feel a bit tacky sending out electronic Christmas greetings, and I do mail a few to people I know won't read a Christmas letter on line, but the printed version is plain vanilla. Black print on white paper. Period. The on-line version can be multi-colored, have lots of big pretty pictures, can be designed to have a Christmassy look to it. It takes a LOT more love and effort to design an on-line Christmas letter so I'm gradually getting over my sense of the "tacky." Sending 200 Christmas cards at 42 cents apiece just seemed silly. So I no longer make my annual big donation to the post office.

Oh, I still use the post office. I mail things to Peggy that she has purchased here in the US but which vendors won't send to Australia. I send packages to others now and then, but whereas I used to be a regular at the post office, now I'm there maybe 4 or 5 times a year. And my "postage budget" has been reduced significantly.

Part of me wants to feel sorry for the postal service that it is losing money, but I don't see it ever disappearing entirely. How else will e-Bay customers get their stuff? How will Amazon survive? I think the post office needs to re-invent itself in order to maximize potential revenue.

But as for me? They've priced themselves out of MY price range, when I have a faster, better alternative.

As for cutting from delivery 6 days a week to 5 days a week, I can't see why that's such a big deal, in my life at least. I can certainly go another day without a mountain of catalogs for stuff I don't intend to buy!