| Do you know Tom? Does
anyone know his new phone number? Tom has been my mail carrier for several
years and I was under the apparently erroneous impression that we had a
pleasant relationship.
You see for all these years
whenever a package came for me that had to be signed for; Tom would call and
ask if I would be there to sign. Sometimes he had to leave a message that
included his phone number and I would return the call and arrange to sign for
my mail.
All of a sudden and with no
warning, Tom’s boss took away his phone privileges. Instead of a call, I
received a small form instructing me to go to the Post Office to pick up the
mail that required signatures. The first time this happened I thought Tom was
just on vacation and his temporary replacement just wasn’t familiar with
our arrangement.
But alas, when I tried to call
the local number for the Post Office I was informed that all calls were being
routed through an eight hundred number in Utah. It would seem that the days of
reaching a local postal employee through a local number were over. This new,
improved method of directing postal inquiries to a nameless, faceless,
telephone information kiosk in Utah is designed to save money.
My money? No! The presumed
savings go to the Post Office, and not even the local one. The mother Post
Office in Washington from whence all good things derive. What’s wrong with
this picture? Does the Postmaster General actually believe that following
corporate America into the current state of service anorexia will endear him or
his employees to us?
Nobody can be quite that stupid,
so I choose to believe that someone sold him a bottle of magic elixir off the
back of an alternative delivery truck. That he’ll come to his senses any
moment now and put an end to this temporary state of postal service
dementia.
However, in the off chance that
this is a serious attempt to cut costs, let’s logically examine this
business about saving money. Each Post Office used to have a local telephone
number, provided through the local telephone company. These phones, I can only
presume, were used primarily for incoming or outgoing local calls. Local calls
do not cost additional money. The calls were answered by an employee already
working there and their wage was already being paid whether they were sorting
magazines or answering your question on the phone.
Eight hundred numbers are
charged, by the incoming call, to the holder of the number, regardless of the
location of the call originator. If you live across the street from the Post
Office and wish to obtain information, you now get someone two states away, who
may or may not be able to answer your question.
The postal information operators
who take your call are new hires. New hires, by any definition are expensive.
There must be extensive training involved and again I’ll presume they
belong to the same union as any other postal employee. That would mean that
they are entitled to the same wages and benefits. Both training and benefit
packages are also expensive.
I have not heard that the Postal
Service is laying off thousands of carriers because they won’t be needed
with the new system in place. So just exactly how does this bizarre system save
money? Either there is something I don’t know and can’t deduce
through the normal calculation of business costs, or they also got a great deal
off the back of the same truck on the wool they’re trying to pull over our
eyes.
Never mind the costs or savings.
It’s the civilized relationship and human contact that has, once again,
been shunted aside to make way for a new corporate electronic toy. I for one,
lament the loss.
|
