I’m Fixing to Go Out and Check on the Mail

I’m fixing to go out and check on the mail.

Actually I was more concerned about the outgoing than the incoming mail because I had posted a letter to Doctor Laura, and I wanted to be sure the mail rider hadn’t just tossed today’s pile of junk on top of it instead of picking it up. Sometimes that happens, especially on Saturday’s when they have a part timer working.

Sometimes I wondered why I even went out there because all I ever got was solicitations from credit card and insurance companies. There was also always a few catalogs and occasionally a fat envelope from Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes.

Speaking of them, I see their TV commercials where their million dollar winners answer the knock on their front doors and excitedly accept their big prize, but never have I seen a winner identified in a newspaper or interviewed on TV. I think their winners are all fake.

Today there was a monthly bulletin from AARP, which I would use to start a fire with later. And as usual, there was a big packet from a casino offering me free airline tickets, a hotel room and two tickets to see Wayne Newton perform if I would just come down there and put several thousand dollars into their slot machines.

I never get any checks in the mail anymore. Small as they were, these days they go electronically to the bank, which is no improvement on my part because you still have to wait 72 hours before you can draw on it, whereas if I write a check it’s cashed in the next nanosecond after I sign it.

Since I suppose back when the Pony Express was established, the USPS had been delivering the mail, and they took in revenue of $67.1 billion in 2010. The problem is their operating expenses were $75.6 billion. They lost $8.5 billion in 2010, up from a loss of $4.7 billion in 2009. Any other business operating with numbers like these would have had a fork stuck in them long ago.

Their biggest problem is the decline of first class mail. You can still send a letter from Monticello, GA, to Monterrey, CA in three days for 44 cents, however, you can send an email in a few seconds with a cost too small to measure, and with distribution to countless numbers.

I attempted to figure the real cost of sending that letter from Monticello to Monterrey by factoring in that $8.5 billion loss to taxpayers, but when I got into the billions my calculator started smoking and melted down into a blob of plastic and metal, which seemed to me to be symbolic of what happens to a business fixing to be run by the government.