I would like to write a letter/opinion concerning the utter and complete failings of the postal service. The issues are fundamentally ones of work ethics by postal employees and go to the heart of the matter on missions and mandates on mail processing and delivery service to customer satisfaction.
First, let me be perfectly clear that I’m not some old disgruntled geezer with an ax to grind or just caterwauling over government employees with good salaries and benefits.
I think I can speak with some clarity in credibility of postal mechanization in echelon of craft bargaining units and management of postal service. Upon retiring from the military and working as a Texas peace officer, I started my second career with the postal service in 1985 as a carrier and later a clerk for 21 years working all facets at the general mail facility and area offices throughout Fort Worth, Texas, and incidentally, my grandfather Lawrence Andrews carried mail in Eastman for 45 years upon retiring in 1959, so, I’m not writing this blind.
I can frankly say that during my tenure, I’ve seen the bar of excellence in hiring practices, mail processing, and mail delivery to the bar in the toilet, whereas, their is virtually no more testing, no background checks, but instead, the postal service has a new modernity called “transitional” and “casual” which, a majority of them came through by virtue of nepotism. In 1985, a supervisor was sartorially mandated to wear a coat and tie with ladies conforming to a skirt and blouse and craft employees had to be neat and clean, now, the optics at any mail processing plant and to look at the employees you would think that you are looking at bums and hobos on a beach sipping mai tais, and that is being conservative. In some plants where I’ve been, specifically, Dallas, Texas, it was more risqué and indecorous where one employee was working in her underwear. The working behavior of postal employees is so indolence that they do more work to get out of work by filing frivolous grievances through the union and yucking it up with the steward in the union hall all day. I’ve seen as much criminal activity at the Ft. Worth plant as I did as a county deputy and city police officer. The postal inspection service is about as much professional as the key stone cops, every case that I witnessed of theft, prostitution, assaults and other crimes, the perp came back with full back pay and benefits. As far as the mail delivery, it would be akin to the pony express with my newspaper that the fine staff of the Dodge County News so graciously forwarded to me first class mail sometimes taking two weeks, and some copies I still haven’t got! Whatever circuitous route it took is still driving nowhere. And if that is not bad enough, the postal service has the unmitigated temerity to still uptick more price increases. What’s that old adage -”The price of stamps goes up, and the service goes down!”
And finally, the death of transparency and the hubris in precipice that the postal service continues to delude the American populace will morosely doom that fine agency that Benjamin Franklin founded.
Maybe someone in Washington D. C. will see a copy of this letter and smell the coffee and do something before it’s too late. On second thought, that would be more rhetorical anyway, I forgot, the democrats are still in power. Oh well! Wishful thinking.
TSGT. Joseph Bryan, U. S. A. F. Retired
