Postal service failing to deliver

A "beebonk" sound emanated from my daughter’s cell phone while she was visiting this past week. It’s a different sound than the ring of her phone or the sound an incoming e-mail makes. It’s the signal that informs her that she has a text message.

One particular text message informed her that her husband, deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army, was online and ready to chat. She often gets online with her deployed husband through a video connection that permits his 2-year-old son to see him and interact with him, real time.

Other than a quick note scribbled and included in the "care packages" she sends him over there, real letters are nonexistent between my daughter and son in-law.

"Writing" (this word is in quotes because it is debatable whether e-mailing or texting is really writing) e-mails and text messages is the only written communication that occurs between them.

The romance of perfumed letters lovingly penned, filled with information, sealed with a kiss and saved by the recipient in a special box for posterity, is about as passé as buggy whips.

Sadly, my son in-law will never experience the long-delayed anticipation and then the thrill of receiving such a letter with the faint imprint of his wife’s lipstick on the flap of a pink, sweet smelling envelope.

This is a problem not only for romance, but also for history. Text messages and e-mails are instantaneously relegated to the virtual trash heap of cyberspace at the press of a button.

Passionate, hand-written letters that contained newsy reports from deployed soldiers, on the other hand, were often saved, wrapped in a bow and carefully placed in a box with other important papers. There have been many books written on war letters. I doubt we will ever see a book entitled, "Text Messages from the Front." But I digress.

It is these changes in communication between loved ones that underlies the problem the U.S. Postal Service has with its budget. The service’s very existence is in question.

It lost nearly $4 billion last fiscal year and it continues to hemorrhage money. Americans cannot and will not keep pouring their hard-earned dollars down a black hole.

Even though I still write several real letters to loved ones every month and still write and mail checks to pay some of my bills, I’m a "postasaurus" compared to anyone I know younger than 50. Few are writing letters or paying bills by mail anymore.

To survive, the postal service has to do something different, radical, and transformational. Cutting Saturday service will not suffice.

That mailing letters (and buying stamps) is from a bygone age means that, except in the most remote, accessible-only-by-foot areas, we may have to function without home delivery. Period.

Given that most Americans have access to a car, it has been suggested that the service create drive-through mail stores where mail would be retrieved and postal services would be combined with other services such as vehicle registration and fast-food. Home delivery would be an extra-cost option under this scenario.

Instead of transformation though, the postal service has its proverbial head in the sand (and Congress, too, which has to approve any major changes to postal services) asking this month for yet another rate increase of first class letters from 44 cents to 46 cents. This in the midst of increasingly fewer letters being mailed.

I went into a local branch post office the other day and a bold, hand-lettered sign greeted me. Entering that office reminded me of the 1970 Five Man Electrical Band song, "Signs," the chorus of which goes, "Sign, sign, everywhere a sign, blocking the scenery breaking my mind, do this don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?"

Oh, I could read the sign all right. "No duct tape. No scotch tape. No masking tape. No unsigned credit cards. No packing tape is provided but we will be happy to sell you packing tape for your package. Have a nice day."

FedEx and United Parcel Service get it. You would never see a sign like that in one of their businesses. They’re happy to take an unsigned credit card.

Someone’s not thinking here. A two-cent increase in the cost of a first-class letter that isn’t being mailed anyway is not going to save the postal service. Four-day home delivery is not going to save it either.

Getting rid of the "we can’t do nothing for you, nohow, noway" signs and the surly clerks may help stave off the inevitable. But only real transformational leadership and a stop to congressional intransigence will save the postal service.

Barry Fetzer is a retired Marine whose column appears here every other week. He can be reached at fetzerab@ec.rr.com.