Tag: USPS

Frieda’s Theme Music

Winter is perched in Ashlandia and its surroundings for another day. Yesterday, we sequenced through snow, sleet, rain, sunshine, repeat. Today seems like a duplicate effort. Snow is falling, the temperature is crowding 38 F with a questionable chance the air temp will light up 48 F. This is Frieda, March 14, 2025.

I read with serious dismay that the US Postal Service struck a deal to let DOGE ‘improve’ services.

That’s great news, innit? Yes, that’s snark.

I don’t find it great news at all. All that I’ve seen of DOGE so far is cutting headcount without having knowledge about what they’re doing. This has fed chaos in many areas of government. Facing outrage and backlash to the chaos, GOTP politicians have stopped holding townhalls and avoid meeting their constituents. Meanwhile, many agencies which had DOGE cuts had to hire people back, either because vital positions had been cut, or courts ruled that what DOGE did was illegal. Coupled with PINO Trusk’s tariffs, economic war, and imperial military interests, the stock market is rushing down, talk of a Trumpcession is heating up, and corporations are putting plans on hold and laying off/terminating employees due to ‘economic uncertainy and instabilitly’. Good times! So much winning!

Anyway, I’m not optimistic about what will happen to the mail system with DOGE’s ‘help’. The length of time needed for mail to be delivered has already increased. So have stamp prices. Post offices and satellite offices have been closed. We all drive further to wait longer to get postal business done. Our mail takes laborious, convoluted routes. Doesn’t go from A to B no even A to C. No, it now goes A to K and then back to H, up to P, back to D, and then, finally, B, it’s destination. Dog knows what DOGE will do to it.

Another series of uplifted dreams washed through my sleep. I awoke feeling rested, vigorous, and almost joyful. Weirdly, The Neurons inserted a 1986 song called “Mad About You” by Belinda Carlisle into the morning mental music stream. I have nothing against the song; I know it from the car radio. Driving in my car, doing errands, commuting to work, etc. It’s a bouncy tune with easily heard and appreciated lyrics, simple for a sing along, Maybe you know it and will sing along.

Coffee has established its presence in my system. I’m ready to get out into the snow and wind — didn’t mention the wind before, did I, but, yes, there is wind — and get down to bidness. Have the best day possible for yourself and yours. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Mood: Sobersunnyreflectin’

Welcome to Thursday, Jan 9, 2025. We started out with the weather duplicating yesterday’s Ashlandia presentation. Sunshine lit up the bare trees, highlighting some frost, conveying a late fall scene. Walking through the house, I was thinking about how nice it was to experience early morning sunshine again. Temperature was 43 F, etc. But within an hour, fog was stealing the sun away from us and hiding out the blue sky. I thought, man, what kind of game is nature playing with us?

That thought triggered The Neurons. Within a few sips of java, The Neurons had Queen performing “Play the Game” in the morning mental music stream (Trademark late). Released in 1980, I remember listening to this song for the first time with two cousins in San Antonio. Both younger than me, both are deceased. One, a slender blonde guy, from a heart attack without warning at 43. The other, a slender dark-hair person who sparkled with wit and kindness, from cancer at 64. Sobering morning thoughts.

On the heels of those sobering thoughts were worries about the folks of southern California. Being in the Pacific Northwest, many who live in this town have California connections. Friends and family live down there. They work down there as musicians, nurses, doctors, teachers, and professors. So worry over the California fire scene is rampant up here.

The fog has lifted again up here. It still swirls around down in the lower elevations. It’s always interesting to go a mile into, traveling down a thousand feet in elevation to see how different the weather is.

I forgot to mention that I received the Christmas cards my parents had mailed me from San Antonio, Texas, and Pittsburgh, PA. The cards came in the Jan. 6 mail delivery. That DeJoy has really done wonders for the US Postal Service.

Coffee and I have struck a bargaining agreement. On my end, I’ll heat the water and put the ingredients together. On their part, the coffee will navigate my body and boost my energy. Here we go, on into 2025. Enjoy the music. Cheers

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Friday’s Wandering Thoughts

Here is a disturbing but unvetted anecdote culled from social media.

I found this an interesting sign of the decline of USPS. I picked up a customers late payment yesterday from her home. She had mailed it and the post office returned it marked unable to deliver. I took it in to the post office. The fellow at the counter said a lot of the employees can’t read cursive! No other reason that he knew of for the return. Since it was to a PO box and the zip was clearly there, I’d say problem solving skills were non existent as well.

Well, shoot. Several possible solutions exist. Wonder what will happen, if anything? I suspect it’ll reach a point where the DeJoy postal system decrees that bans cursive. That’s the kind of non-empathetic ‘problem solver’ he is.






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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Mood: Pepperyfresh

An endless duvet of clouds challenges the sky. Flat and almost featureless, the clouds vary in tones of blue, white, and gray. Sunshine is out there because it’s daytime but the heat and light are undercover. A cold layer has settled across Ashlandia’s soul and the trees’ colors are fading as they shed leaves. 48 F now, we’ll clock out at 58 F today.

Received my molasses mail for my planned surgery yesterday. Gotta call it molasses mail because snail mail conjures too much speed for how slow local mail is in this age. Been waiting and waiting for that piece from my surgeon’s office, wondering where it was.

My surgeon’s office is about twenty miles up the Interstate from Ashland, in our region’s largest city, Medford. Recent local posts claim that mail between Medford and Ashland now requires seventeen days. That’s because Louis DeJoy reorganized things to make the USPS more like a business. So our mail takes days of traveling, handling, and waiting. It’s picked up in Medford, goes north up I-5, gets processed, and comes back down south via I-5 to travel the final twenty miles. I can’t testify that seventeen days is accurate, but that package did take over ten days.

Hell, twenty miles, they could have walked it over in less time. This is the GOP idea of ‘progress’.

Meantime, not having that letter caused confusion. It informed me that they would be reaching out to me to make a pre-op appointment, and what would happen during it. The document set up milestones and provided instructions. Meanwhile, the electronic side of the system hummed along. I received email notification of the pre-op last week, along with the post-op appointments. I guessed the gist of all of that but it sure would have been nice to have the explanatory documents beforehand. Guess the med system needs to change its methodology now that Louis DeJoy broke the postal system. It’s another reason to give thanks to D.J. Trump, who appointed jackass DeJoy.

Makes you shudder to think of how badly Trump would break the government with Project 2025 as his instruction manual.

With the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame happenings taking place, The Neurons revisited music by the various inductees. Dionne Warwick, Mary J. Blige, Kool & The Gang, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Dave Mathews Band. Cher, Ozzy Osborne, Foreigner, and Peter Frampton. Awesome music and a wide range of superb tunes were put out by these performers.

I ended up with A Tribe Called Quest playing “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” in the morning mental music stream (Trademark famous). It was a confluence of factors guiding the choice. My wife and I went to leave the house, and I said, “Oh, wait, I left my wallet in the office.” As I’d just been reading and remembering songs, Der Neurons instantly pounced with “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo”. The song has a steady, hip moving beat and humorous lyrics about a road trip that goes askew. Who hasn’t had something like that happen? Well, I imagine there are a number of people who haven’t had one askew, but came close enough to identify.

Here we go, time to rock and roll. Coffee and I are bopping along ago, and my pulse has acquired some strength to it. Be strong, stay positive, test negative, and vote blue. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Mail Concerns

URGENT! PLEASE CALL YOUR SENATORS…

I echo the concerns Annie brings up as Jessica Craven noted in her blog, Chop Wood Carry Water.

USPS performance has tumbled since DeJoy’s ascension as Postmaster General. Whether it’s incompetence, the tortured desire to run the USPS as a business and turn a profit, or actual maliciousness for reasons only known in his mind and private circles, deliveries are taking longer, more letters are being returned as undeliverable, and rural post offices and stations have been closed, raising the challenges of doing even the most mundane business at a post office.

It’s a concern going into the elections. Democrats use mail-in ballots more than Republicans. D.J. Trump actively rails against absentee and mail-in voting and is already establishing the foundation to challenge and throw out ballots received via mail.

Reach out to your senators and representatives. Add your voice to these concerns. And vote blue.

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Monday’s Wandering Thoughts

Each morning, I post to WordPress. The first time each day, WP usually suggests tags to add. I click to add them. And every day it tells me, ‘No tags added’.

It amuses and dissatisfies me.

Amuses me because it’s so consistent. Dissatisfies me for the same reason. See, it’s offering something, and then it’s failing. Every day, without fail.

For me, it’s part of a much longer list of small tech failures encountered on a daily basis. Little things. Buttons and widgets not working. Apps crashing.

We see it on a larger scale. One is quiet, like how fucked up deliveries with the post office have become. I tracked a package last week from Newark, California, to Roseburg, Oregon, to Portland, Oregon, to Roseburg, Oregon, to Medord, before it reached me in Ashland. Ashland, BTW, is closer to Newark than Roseburg, Portland, or Medford.

This week, I tracked a package to Fife, Washington. Where the package entered another dimension and the system has no idea where it is.

We all figure it’s a one-off, so we don’t complain about it. Then, when we do, we often discover the problem is affecting more of us than we realized. It’s a larger problem than realized.

But sometimes, the tech failure is so visible, we can’t look away. Take the Boeing aircraft failures. Or the Boeing Starliner failure that has stranded two astronauts at the space station.

The United States is steadily spiraling downward in many ways. We can’t deal with our gun violence; the GOP stops actions. We can’t deal with climate change and wildfires and the extreme weather it causes: the GOP stops it. We can’t deal with quality failures…well, that’s more about money.

People can’t afford houses. Meanwhile, college students are drowning in debt. Do you think that’s not related?

As always, as these things happen, the GOP is pointing at other things as problems that aren’t problems. Books in schools. DEI. Declining church attendance. Voter fraud.

Yes, there’s a pattern here. We as a nation are stagnating. As a small group gets wealthier and achieve a better life, the rest of us are left dealing with small problems. Problem with small problems is that they add up.

Just ask Boeing.

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UPS Mail Innovations

It’s a grip-worthy day for me. We ordered a packaged. 28 August. It was shipped via UPS Mail Innovactions the next day, or maybe the one after that.

UPS said we’d receive it by September 3. That didn’t happen. Package was in Fife, Washington. Transferred to the USPS. Because this is Mail Innovations.

The package arrived at Fife, WA, on September 3. An update said, your package will be delivered on September 6 by 7 PM.

Didn’t happen. I went to the UPS said, tracked the package — still in Fife, WA, on September 3, the shipment that stood still — and used the assistant link they provided me.

It was not useful. Said the tracking number which UPS provided me is not a UPS tracking number. Well, I saw exactly where the gap began. My number is for UPS Mail Interventions, I mean, Mail Innovations. UPS and its virtual assistance is not set up to assist with that innovation.

Sigh. More first world blues.

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The Great American Postal System

Warning: snark might be encountered ahead.

I want to give a shout out to the US Postal System. Rates went up again recently. We know that probably means systemic improvements…right?

Of course! Although, um, postal workers in my area are concerned with mail not being picked up. Thanks to the price increase and a new modernization effort, we’ve gone from having five trucks to collect the mail and start its journey. Now we’re down to one. Wow, that’s efficiency!

Except, ah, my Visa credit card people are often concerned, sending emails, reminding us to pay our bill because the due date is coming up. “They should have received it,” my wife and I agreed. She added, “It’s due the fifteenth and I mailed it before the first.” This was back in November. “Maybe weather delayed it,” I put in. But this had never happened before. Now it’s happened three times.

Jeremy Schilling, president of the American Postal Workers Union Local 342 here in the Rogue Valley may have given us the answer. Going from five trucks to one doesn’t work well, he asserts. “Talent and Phoenix are now on the same route as Ashland. As a larger population center, Ashland requires its own truck. That being the case, the one truck (for all three cities) is already full when it reaches its next stops. This is happening across the whole state right now,” Schilling said. (h/t to rv-times.com)

This is the plan that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-year “Delivering for America” plan has delivered to us. Besides the one truck replacing five idea, his plan calls for dropping the second daily pickup. So instead of racing to the Post Office to get something into the mail before the early collection time, it’s just the one collection at five PM.

See what higher price stamps get us?

But it’ll save a lot of money, DeJoy asserts. Schilling’s response speaks for me. “With this new truck route that saves so much money, are they telling me the money saved is because they’re going to abandon mail every day because the truck is too full?” Schilling asked. Seems so from my vantage, but I’m only a customer, which makes me an outsider.

Reduced trucks and fewer collection times are just two of the improvements which DeJoy has imposed. Under his plan, there is consolidation in the name of efficiency. The Institute for Policy Studies asserts what this could mean for me and my mail in their study, The USPS Network Consolidation Plan: What’s at Stake for Southern Oregon. Among their findings are Potential slower delivery times and Risk of transportation disruptions, which you always want when you’ve established an improvement plan for your delivery system.

The study found that under DeJoy’s improvement plan are several nuggets.

Under the USPS plan for the Medford facility, mail and packages posted by local residents and business will travel to Portland for processing – even if the destination address is in the local tri-county area. The state of Oregon has just one major artery going north-south, Interstate highway 5. In normal conditions, the 280-mile route between Medford, which is near the California border, and the Portland regional distribution and processing center site at the northern edge of the state takes about 4 hours and 28 minutes, or 9 hours round-trip.

A First Class letter shipped from Klamath Falls in Oregon to Sacramento, California would today travel 387 miles and take 6 hours. Under the consolidation plan, that letter, passing through Portland, rather than Medford, would travel twice as many miles, and take twice as long to make the journey – 858 miles and 13 hours of travel time.

Wow, longer time and further distances for things to be delivered! That has to be better, right, because more is better, isn’t it? Apparently that’s how DeJoy thinks. And think of how this will affect traffic, air pollution, and additional costs in gas and wear and tear on vehicles. Win win win! Fortunately, they are moving to electric vehicles. Money has been commited, but the transition has been slowed by none other than DeJoy.

You might be thinking, where have I heard of Louis DeJoy before? Well, the man was put into position by President Donald J. Trump (but not appointed), and we know that Trump is all about efficiency (yes, that’s sarcasm) and has an eye for capable people (yes, more sarcasm, given how many positions in his A team turned over in his only term. Answer: 92%. President Biden’s is 71%). Likewise, Trump’s cabinet appointments turned over more than Presidents Obama, Dubya and his pops, and Reagan.

DeJoy advocates for privatizing the USPS. So he doesn’t really want it to excel as a government service. What better way to gain advocates for privatizing a government system that’s working than by sabotaging it?

DeJoy is also the guy who handicapped the USPS and its ability to support dealing with COVID-19 and ensuring mail-in ballots arrived as expected during the 2020 election.

So he’s doing a heckuva job, as President Bush told Brownie ten days before Brownie resigned because he hadn’t done a heckuva job at all.

Yep, heckuva job, DeJoy. Way he’s going, it’ll cost a dollar for a stamp and the mail will take a month to reach its destination. Such efficiency!

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Friday’s Wandering Thoughts

I saw a photograph of a USPS envelope in an online post today.

The photo was supporting a story about the first female postmaster in colonial America. First thought: I didn’t know they had cameras capable of doing such clear, detailed photographs in colonial America. The colonists were more advanced than I thought. (Yeah, that’s snark.)

Second thought, looking at the envelope in the photo, what is v-mail service?

As it was part of the return address for the War & Navy Departments, I figured it was related to WWII, and the v probably meant victory. I looked it up online and verified that. But there was more to the story:

“Generative AI is experimental. Info quality may vary.

“V-mail, short for Victory Mail, was a mail service used during World War II to expedite mail service for American armed forces overseas. The Post Office Department officially inaugurated V-Mail service on June 15, 1942. 

“V-mail worked by: 

  • Letters written on pre-printed forms were photographed and reproduced onto microfilm.
  • The rolls of microfilm were transported overseas.
  • The letters were printed again at one-quarter size and mailed to their destination.”

They were using microfilm to transport letters in WWII.

I’ve only been alive for almost 68 years, and wasn’t alive during WWII. In all that time, I’d never heard or seen v-mail service referenced anywhere. Maybe it just flew over my head. I don’t know.

It’s really surprising as Mom was a little girl living in a small rural town in Iowa during WWII. She had brothers who served in the US Navy, as did her friends and classmates. Stories from the fronts transfixed her. I thought she would have mentioned v-mail service. That causes me to wonder if she is aware of it. It’s something to ask her.

What’s more astonishing is that the v-mail service wasn’t original. This system was based on a British service called “Airgraph”. Giving me another pow-pow moment of discovery, Airgraph was developed by the Eastman Kodak Company in conjuction with Imperial Airways and Pan-American Airways in the 1930s.

Pow. I’m knocked down in amazement.

Once again, learning something new and astonishing. It makes me smile.

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Worth Pondering

An actual tracking record for a package, courtesy of USPS, as of Tuesday, December 27, 2022, 9:26 PM.

The package is out for delivery, as it was on Monday, December 26.

Details were checked to see what was going on. Erwin Schrödinger delivered the tracking process. Heisenberg helped.

Monday, December 26

6:56 PM

Package left the carrier facility.

6:52 PM

Package left the carrier facility.

11:55 AM

Package arrived at a carrier facility.

11:50 AM

Package arrived at a carrier facility.

7:37 AM

Package left the carrier facility.

1:49 AM

Package left the carrier facility.

Sunday, December 25

3:59 PM

Package arrived at a carrier facility.

10:54 AM

Package left the carrier facility.

10:49 AM

Package left the carrier facility.

Saturday, December 24

4:52 AM

Package arrived at a carrier facility.

4:09 AM

Package arrived at a carrier facility.

3:27 AM

Package left the carrier facility.

2:32 AM

Package left the carrier facility.

Friday, December 23

10:50 PM

Package arrived at a carrier facility.

9:35 PM

Package arrived at a carrier facility.

1:24 PM

Package arrived at a carrier facility.

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