Wheeeeeeee!

The post office is going to solve their problems by making the mail slower. I'm not making this up


You should take your cue from them, Jeremy. You can solve your Blag problems by writing crappier Sametime Statuses.


I don't have any Blag problems.


That's what you think...


So today's Sametime Status is all about the US Postal Service and their plans to cut services and mail sorting facilities in an effort to save on costs. The net result of this is that the number of one-day mail deliveries for standard first-class mail will be reduced to 0% from the current level of 41.5%.


We know you're not making that up because it's not 83%


It's in the Wall Street Journal if you want to look it up.

Here's the problem. The Postal Service is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic by moving them to the part of the ship that's sinking, thereby only serving to make things worse. You know why people are sending less mail than they used to? It's slow and expensive. At first, the Postal Service was a magnificent thing, delivering a letter anywhere you wanted it to go for the price of a stamp. This was nothing short of an amazing bargain when the alternative would be paying through the nose for a courier or hopping in the car to deliver it yourself. Times have changed, and the world is smaller. 40 cents (or whatever the frig a stamp costs these days) is no longer a reasonable price to pay to communicate with somebody just because they're far away. I have email, instant messengers, social networking, Blags, and a phone with free long-distance. On top of all that, the one thing all of those have in common that the Post Office doesn't? They're roughly instant.

So, for free I can send letters, documents, personal missives, and bill payments (Forget you, Strunk and White, I'm keeping the Oxford Comma!) with no delays at all with equipment I'm going to be using almost constantly anyway...or I can buy envelopes, write stuff (or print it out), assemble it, buy a stamp to stick on the envelope, drop it in the mailbox and wait a couple days hoping it gets there. Seems pretty clear who the winner is in this one.

It's a little sad that the US Postal Service has become antiquated, but it's the reality we face. When coming up with ways to "fix" the postal service so that it makes itself viable again, one must not overlook the reasons for its downfall in the first place.