Sunday, August 30, 2009

A hearty F-U from the USPS



The United States Postal Service has taken to giving Durham the proverbial bird all summer long. Ostensibly a government service, the inefficient, inscrutable, opaque USPS has decided not to offer service in many of its Durham branches this summer. The bums are closing the main downtown post office at 2pm. The losers fail to offer an automatic teller machine that sells stamps or stickers packages in this, the main Durham branch. For fuck's sake, there are 217,000 people in this city, the Postal Service can't come up with one automated machine at the main downtown branch!!!

They need to fire a few of their lax, lazy-ass supervisors and they could afford quite a few more machines.

Maybe there are those of you who think, well, they are closing the main post office three hours early and not opening at all on Saturday, perhaps we could go to the 27705 branch off of La Salle Street. Ha! Nope! They are closed at 2pm also. However, at least La Salle Street does offer an automatic postal machine. Unfortunately, the USPS specializes in finding new ways to inconvenience their patrons; the machine does not accept cash!

Perhaps the 27704 post office is better. After all, the USPS just spent the money to relocate that branch across the street to a new location, from the horrible dump with atrocious nearly impassable parking lot, where they had it. Of course it is not better, it is perhaps even more infuriating than any of them. During peak hours (when most of the other post offices in town have knocked off early) this post office is manned by a mere one counter employee. There is no automatic postal machine.

These jerks found time and money to sponsor a bike team for eight years!?! If the Clarion Content had its way, the Post Office would be forbidden from advertising, and forced to redirect those expenditures into improving service and efficiency with a particular emphasis on automated service machines. (Including one's that accept cash, seriously, the grocery store has them.)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

YES! What the hell ever happened to consistent and reliable service equals FREE word of mouth advertising...?

Clarion Content said...

Heck yes Dank. I am a firm believer that the best advertising is word of mouth. I would much rather trust the recommendation of someone I know over a paid, agenda laden promoter.

We would be better served if the post office was not allowed to spend a penny on advertising.