The Post Office is terrible

Allow me, friends, to vent.

The US Postal Service wants to ruin my life.

A little while ago, a month to be exact, my mailbox was broken into. This should strike you as odd because there's no reason anyone would ever want to break into my mailbox. I have nothing that is useful to anybody. This blog should be resounding proof of that. Well, my neighborhood has these mailboxes that are really everybody's mailboxes. It's a locker system. It stinks.

I know why that's there. It's Texas. It's hot. Going door to door will cause a person to sweat through their own personhood. It's being controlled by a Congress that is inept. Many of the problems that face USPS today are not of its own making. I understand.

I do not understand the USPS system to report a broken into mailbox. You call the postal inspector at 1-877-876-2455. You have to speak your answers into the phone. You don't hit a number like the good old days. You don't speak to a human like the gooder old days. You have to speak to a machine that is wet-brained. The machine understands 10% of the time. This happens.

But do you know what happens when the machine doesn't understand? It HANGS UP on you after saying, "I didn't understand your answer. Goodbye." It doesn't start from the very beginning. It doesn't keep trying in an endless loop. It doesn't give up and call a human. It just fucking hangs up.

I was so pissed after the fourth time this happened that I shoved my phone down my throat and tried to see if shitting it out would help me. A bowel obstruction and an anger management class later, I'm still drinking smoothies with no help to my lack-of-mail situation.

It's been a month and the mailbox still hasn't been fixed. I go once a week to pick up my mail at the post office. This would be great if the post office was a mile away. It's 20-30 minutes away in Austin traffic. Nobody knows when the mailboxes will be fixed. There's a spate of mailbox theft going around in Austin.

To make matters worse, my HOA is charging a late fee for a bill that was sent during this period. It is the only bill sent to me in my name but we're apparently a year behind. I figured out that they'd been sending bills to the old owner but a bureaucracy never admits fault and only doubles down.

The HOA is worse. The USPS has to exist. The HOA is there to take money and not protect your mailboxes.

What have I become?

UPDATE: 

A post dedicated to our new mailman

New mailman/mailwoman/mailperson/post office employee who walks and delivers,

You have delivered mail to the wrong house every Friday. I have walked that mail over to the intended recipient because I believe people should get their mail. Whoever's getting my mail has so far declined to do the same courtesy for me.

Listen, motherfucker, that package is not mine and if you drop it off here, this family fucking dies. 

You did not deliver mail yesterday. It was not a federal holiday. What the fuck are you doing with my goddamned mail?

I tried to call to complain but the Post Office automaton was really insistent I heard the entire privacy statement. The robot gave a small spiel and then asked, "If you'd like to hear more, press 1." Up until that point, the machine was asking me to speak. Impatiently, I just said, "No," before the instruction to press 1. That was a mistake. 

Then again: "If you'd like to hear more, press 1."

Listen, you little shit, I don't care that you can fit into your daddy's uniform. You can't fucking read and that's obvious because those letters in your goddamned hand that you're delivering to me are not for me. Put them back in your bag before I tell you Santa Claus isn't real but that's a damn shame because only a mythical creature that stupid little kids believe in can deliver the mail accurately in this fucking town. 

I tried to call to complain but the Post Office automaton was really insistent I heard the entire privacy statement. The robot gave a small spiel and then asked, "If you'd like to hear more, press 1." Up until that point, the machine was asking me to speak. Impatiently, I just said, "No," before the instruction to press 1. That was a mistake. 

Then again: "If you'd like to hear more, press 1."

What kind of manipulative behavioral science went into that? Where's option 2? The option that doesn't care about the privacy statement or how this call is used or any of that? I just want my mail. 

Mailman, male man, don't think I don't have the stubbornness of a goat donkey to wait outside for you all goddamn day just so I can confront you about what the fuck you're doing. I will because I can't wait for an hour thirteen minutes to an hour eighteen minutes on the phone listening to music that sounds like it was inspired by music inspired by Final Fantasy 6 music.

And now, I will say USPS over and over again in hopes some bureaucratic algorithm picks it up in between long sessions of being hacked by the Russians and Chinese.

I give up. I give up. This isn't even a picture of a mailman. It's a picture of a male man. 

Good night.

USPS USPS USPS USPS

United States Postal Service

Wiener or Weiner? #AmericaVotes2016

Battling Private Bureaucratic Automaton Armies

I hate bureaucracy. Partially because I can't spell bureaucracy correctly the first time ever. It doesn't matter how many times I see Mulder and Scully's faces on their FBI IDs in my head, I will never spell it correctly the first time.

There are too many kinds of bureaucracy. I'm not even talking about government bureaucracy. I'm talking about the bureaucratization of our entire lives. You have a problem with something you purchased? Here, dial a million numbers into a phone as an automated voice continues to ask you seemingly pointless questions. I just want my damn bulk order of Cheetos, man. Where the hell are they?!

It used to be that you could dial '0' at any point during an automated session to get to a real live operator but half the time I try to pull that shit on the phone now, the Voice of Order says, "I'm sorry. That entry was not recognized. Let's start the fuck over so you will contemplate gouging out your own eyes before we can be bothered to resolve this."

I've moved recently. Not far, just a few blocks down on the other side of the highway. The good side of the highway. The side of the highway that doesn't have a 24 hour Whataburger and sirens blaring throughout the night. The USPS has this great program called mail forwarding. You change your address with them and they forward all your mail to your new address for the ludicrous price of less than $2.

I've used this service before and it works great when it actually works. I'm going on a month without any mail forwarded. Luckily, I changed my address with all my creditors so they know where to find me when they need to kill me for not paying them. I use mail forwarding to figure out who I forgot to change my address with. It happens. We have too many masters in our modern life and some are more forgettable and less scary. Let's just say some are more Jesus while others are more Old Testament jealous, angry, vengeful God.

Sitting on the phone for more than fifteen minutes is my idea of Hell. Sitting on the phone, hitting numbers, and, worse, being forced to say something to a robot is like going to Hell and getting each pube ripped off by a pube ripping maniac only to have them grafted back in and ripped off again. I'm talking full-pube. Taint pubes included. The robot couldn't understand the word, "No." I had to say it over and over again. It failed each time.

Worse is when the robot doesn't tell you what to say. It just says, "Hey, man, say some shit into the phone and we have a less than one percent chance of understanding you because AI is still stupid as fuck right now."

It's not like talking to people is any better. I don't even have a strategy any more. I used to be very good at getting people to listen to me and I used to be very understanding. Now I just sob into the phone and hope they can pity me in the short time before it takes them to get aroused by an innocent person's pain.

Can I battle bureaucracy? No. I have given up on any kind of idealism and passion when it comes to the modern world. We have accepted our overlords and their desire to have as little contact with us as possible. We have GMail and Facebook and Amazon and they make life so much easier. They work 99% of the time, too. It's when they don't work when you realize how faceless everything is.

GMail, cool. Take my private conversations and send it to the government as long as I can get an email from whatever most of the time. Facebook, sweet. Tag my friends automatically in my photos. I don't have any so your job is very easy. Amazon, sweet. Give me 25% off of something that's worth 50% more than it's being sold for but where the fuck is my bulk order of Cheetos, man!?