Pessimistic Politics: Post Office Blues

I recently discovered yet another way the post office has concocted to make my life a living Hell.

Before I get into that, I will explain what the United States Post Service is about, for the benefit of those who don’t already know, who are mostly small children and idiots. The rest of us know that the postal service, for the valued customers, will come through, even in rain, snow, sleet, or shine, and completely thwart us in all of are efforts involving them.

We’ve all endured the post office’s quality service in the past at one point in time. We’ve waited in a line of approximately every person in town who've decided to take care of their postal concerns NOW, conveniently in front of you, while the actual postal employees are actively ignoring them. We’ve tried to calculate shipping costs for packages using the postal service’s Voodoo Math Equations, only to discover that, when we actually go to send the package, it is actually .07 ounces too heavy for the current shipping category and must be upgraded to the next shipping category (Mortgage Express). We’ve had to deal with the shipment times, which, for your convenience, are not convenient. There is a very good reason for the post office’s phenomenal level of efficiency and expediency: they are a government agency.

Being a federal branch, the post office, they've become adept at taking your money and promising to get your mail where it was supposed to go, which should take no more than 341 months. One would think that with all of the alternative ways of communicating with other people, like e-mail and smoke signals, they would take some steps to keep customers via major changes in customer policy. But the post office figured, “If it ain’t broke, then make the customer wait in a ridiculously long line for assistance from a single, disgruntled employee whose sole source of pleasure in life is to watch human beings squirm in agony.”

So I thought I had the post office’s many degrees of sadism figured out, until recently. I tried to send a package using Media Mail, an inexpensive way to send a package so that it will never be seen by mortals again. The problem was, the only boxes I had that would hold the items were for Priority Mail service, which is defined as “mail that has a higher chance of reaching its destination this millennium”. I figured that if the postage stamp were for Media Mail, they would have no problem figuring out that they didn’t have to give it any attention, as I surely didn’t pay enough for that level of service. However, this was a government service, so I didn’t want to take any chances and gamble on their level of common sense.

I called my local branch up and asked them if I could use my Priority Mail box for a Media Mail shipment. Keep in mind the box I wanted to use had already been shipped through the mail (Priority Mail, no less), and was currently residing in a dusty, spider-infested part of my basement. It wasn’t doing humanity, or the post office, any good down there.

The person who talked to me seemed, unlike the other postal employees, to be alert, but that might just be because she thought that I was a customer she could torment on the phone. I did not disappoint, as I awkwardly asked if this was the post office I had contacted, since she did not indicate as such when she answered. I could have dialed the barnyard animal addiction hotline, for all I knew.

I asked her if my used Prioroity Mail box was acceptable for Media Mail shipment. This was my first mistake, because apparently the woman was using some kind of word filtering phone that omitted useless words like “used”, “help” and “sadistic, psychotic devil”.

The conversation went downhill from there. The woman changed her tone of voice from a faux-pleasant tone to a tone that sounded like I had just informed her that I kidnapped her children and was going to sell them to a sweatshop in Pakistan if she didn’t pay me a million dollars in non-sequential, two-dollar bills.

She explained to me that they could not send a Priority Mail box with anything but Priority Mail, because that box cost the post office money, and it wasn’t intended for any other mail service. Sensing some confusion, I repeated that it was a used box that had already been sent and paid for, and was basically just sitting around. She claimed that didn’t matter, and that they would charge me for Priority Mail shipping.

I suggested that I wrap it in brown paper, so it would look like a box instead of the Priority Mail Object Delivery Golden Chariot. The woman’s reaction changed from Kidnapping Tone to Shocked Over a Threat to Drown Children in Raw Sewage tone. “That’s illegal!” she proclaimed, her mind racing, deciding whether or not to get involved and call the Army in to stop my terrorist plot.

After trying to reason the policy, the woman calmed down. Then, after I presented my logic that the used box was, really, a box, she didn’t know what to tell me, though she insisted that the box cost the post office money, and was for shipping Priority Mail only. I still have no idea how leaving the box in my basement is better than using it to ship something with a non-Priority service. Maybe they, I don’t know, rent out the boxes to the spiders.

While I have little doubt that the Spider Condominium business is a lucrative one, I still wish I could have just sent the stupid box. I hope it doesn’t appear that I am completely putting down the post office. It is a wonderful service, where for just 37 cents, I can mail a letter from Ohio to California, and it will get there just in time for when Halley’s comet comes around again. That letter will contain money to fund my secret terrorist plot to ship Priority Mail boxes, containing nothing, back to me, and then I will proceed to ship random items to random people using non-Priority service. The only flaw in my plan is that by the time I receive the boxes, I will be dead, but I’m sure this is only a minor setback in the eyes of the post office.