IF I HAD A GUN…

I would have shot and killed my landline phone deader than a doornail by now. In the last month we have been receiving as many as twelve calls a day from something called “ASIA PACIFIC.” Who or what these people want or why they keep calling we have not found an answer to. My guess is it’s an extremely annoying and downright determined telemarketing pest with a robo-caller, and apparently our number is one of its favorites. I called Mid Continent, our cable company that we have our phone hooked up with, to ask what we can do to block the number. They told me to use *77. That would block whatever anonymous number might try to get through. So, I put the *77 on and waited. Sure enough, the phone rang – but only a half ring and nothing more. FINALLY! About a half hour went by, and sure enough, Asia Pacific punched its way thru or around the block and we’re right back to getting calls again. I looked it up on the net and apparently we aren’t the only people this outfit has decided to drive insane. There are all sorts of complaints from everywhere about this company. It seems whoever or whatever they are, they are located outside of the country and no one inside ours can do anything to stop them.

If anyone else is being harassed by this group, or has been harassed and got it stopped, Ash and I would appreciate whatever insight or advice you have. And no, we are not ready to rid ourselves of our landline quite yet. With both our children out of state and calling home as often as they do, we appreciate the ability to talk to them on different phones at the same time. I wonder if there’s a vapor I can shoot into the phone line that would shoot out the other end? With my luck whoever it is would just blow it back my way!

VALUE vs SPEED

According to recent statistics on the U.S. Postal Service, it is the “core of the $1 trillion mail industry and employs more than 8 million people.” And given that the U.S. Postal Service actually delivers “more mail to more addresses in a larger geographical area than any other post in the world” (that would be the 152 million homes, businesses and P.O. boxes in every state, city, town, borough, and parish in the country) one might wonder why in the Sam Hill the U.S. Postal Service cannot make a “go” of things better than they have.

This is no chump-change outfit we’re talking about. The U.S. Postal Service managed to pull in $65 billion in revenue for year 2012. First Class mailings and advertising mailers were the top dollar draws. First Class mail outranked all other rates for ad mail, shipping and package services, and even periodicals, by nearly 11 percentage points. The question is: do Americans really care? Will it become another antiquated behemoth bureaucracy from the past that keeps resurrecting itself by offering new types of delivery available to the public? Considering its most recent offering of public delivery, namely booze, one must wonder, especially when listening to the soothsayers who haven’t much hope of the post office being able to carry off deliveries of beer and wine.

The retail alcohol industry itself gave up on home deliveries when time after time many a driver came back empty-handed and without the goods being delivered to the address assigned, because someone would jump out, grab the booze delivery, and be gone before the delivery person could collect his wits enough to explain what happened. It seems anyone can order using an actual address and then simply wait for the goods to show up.

But it seems the US Postmaster plans to give deliveries of alcohol the old “college try,” or keep begging Congress for permission to do so. In the meantime, take a gander at what our postal services did accomplish last year before caving in to the idea that we’ve outgrown our postal service’s ability to deliver the goods.

In 2012 there were 160 billion pieces of mail processed; 1.8 billion dollars is the amount paid every two weeks to postal employees in salaries and benefits; the USPS provides employment to 522,144 career postal service employees, of whom 108,000 are military veterans; it handled 67.5 million inquiries from the public, and 83.8 million packages were picked up using Free Package Pickup; it accepted 5.7 million passport applications and made $483 million in revenue from Click-N-Ship label purchases, plus another $497 million from the 2,500 self-service kiosks the USPO has. And the United States Postal Service managed to do all this with zero tax dollars for operating the U.S. Postal Service.

Now, can you think of one – just one! – other department or agency within the United States with the oversight of Congress that even comes close to providing the service the United States Postal Service does? Name one.

There are millions of citizens who still rely on the U.S. Postal Service for whatever they send out or receive. And the one thing we can all be certain of is that there will never be enough employees at any time within the Postal Service to sneak a peek into whatever you or I may send out. That cannot be said for text messages or phone calls, can it?

So before you decide to throw in the towel on our postal services, think again about the amount of mail the USPS handles on a daily basis, and how – most of the time – most of whatever we are sending arrives within a few short days. That’s the value of keeping the Postal Service we have all relied upon for well over a century.

All questions and comments please send to: sooasheim@aol.com or to the FM Extra Editor at: tfinney@ncppub.com.