blogfaced.com

considering my rantings and musings about various establishments/people such as wal-mart, the media, pizza delivery dudes, that one annoying guy, hippies, jamba juice, etc. (how’d you like that for plugging myself), you’re probably expecting me to mention the post office by now.

ALAS! i will today…but, for a limited time only, i’m going to try to talk POSITIVE about the 21st century’s pony express…

mostly because i feel post offices get a bad rep (the whole “that job is so miserable people get depressed and shoot everyone” joke doesn’t help…along with the phrase “to go postal”) , so when i got back from the post office not too long ago i decided i needed to put some good karma out there for our government employees. why? because my most recent post office experience was the most painLESS experience (related to mail) EVER. i just had to mail a large envelope…no forms, no lines, nothing. i was in and out in about 2 minutes. when the post office lady said “thank you, have a nice day” i couldn’t move. it’s like going into the doctor for a tetanus shot and you’re bracing yourself for this incredible pain and then they’re like “ok, it’s done” and you’re like ‘what? that’s it?’ like you’re disappointed they didn’t justify your pre-injection whining. so there i am, at the post office, my work done. but i was just waiting there - dumbfounded out of ease and efficiency of my transaction - for one of the disgruntled employees just getting off his coffee break to punch me in the stomach and then tell me to go to the end of the line. you know the end. right by all those two-dimensional priority mail boxes that you have to pay for, and fold yourself, only to have the mailman punt it around “backstage” with his buddies ace ventura-style. then the recipient of the package rips it open and throws it in the trash. SCREW THAT.

nonetheless i was able to leave in triumphant disbelief and feel i must share this because the consumer oriented post office is about to go the way of zubaz pants and crystal clear pepsi (wow, there’s so much great material there i may have to devote entire posts to those topics alone). i mean, for one, i can’t remember the last time i bought stamps. it was probably the last time i wrote a check… which was probably for the stamps. i’m pretty sure it was 1990 when i was mailing away for a free foam boomerang with 10 proofs of purchases from cheerios. those were great, actually. cereals used to have some cool stuff inside. now it’s all crap, like justin timberlake stickers for your notebooks or cd-roms with health propaganda on them. i remember having a specific “bin,” which, as soon as i forced my mom to purchase a cereal, i would just dump the entire box in this bin so i could easily fish out the latest toy. this would happen with multiple cereals and of course i wouldn’t eat them once they were all mixed up. like the last thing i want is to eat a lucky charm red balloon marshmallow with a raisin on it. gross.

ANYWAY - i feel sorry for post office. it’s one of uncle sam’s oldest children. treading water because it can’t pass math class or make friends on the playground, and consistently gets called to the principal’s office for firearm possession. meanwhile its brother, the military, is dominating the world and getting all the budget/media attention. the internet destroyed its era, and once the baby boomers are gone, who will be left to patronize it? why do you think stamps only have old school people like elvis and “i love lucy” on them? because these people are recognized by those using the stamps. you’ll never see jay leno or mc hammer on a circulating stamp. well maybe the hammer, but i’m sure he’d demand 10% of the stamp sales to help get out of bankruptcy (oh!).

but now, people use the post office less because the stamps are annoying and keep going up (if the post office REALLY wanted to boost their presence with the younger generation, they should lace the sticky stamp side with whiskey or ecstasy and revamp their ad campaign: “STAMPS: lick it, mail it or hit it” or something) - so people start sending emails with attachments. so the post office raises the price of stamps to keep its balance sheet afloat. a vicious cycle. i vividly remember the day my dad discovered he could save 37 cents by scanning in newspaper clippings and emailing them instead of snail-mailing them. now i can practically tell you who got the speeding ticket yesterday near the taco bell in my hometown. and his coinpurse has never been more full.

[raise glasses] to the post office!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 10:16 pm and is filed under current events, walk it off. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.