THIS is why we are all Doomed! (A Post Office Story)

Because I have several web based businesses that sell products, I spend quite a lot of time going to the post office.

I also keep a P.O.Box because it's handy and safe, and they'll accept packages and keep them till I pick them up.

Sunset
The sun seems to be setting... on common sense

A few weeks back, I needed to mail a check to a local organization, for participation in their arts event. No big deal... as I am emptying my P.O.Box, I notice that the letter I need to mail is to Box 231-- mine is Box 234. The boxes are just two feet (60cm) apart.

So I stand in line for a bit, hand my stamped letter to the clerk and ask if she can postmark it and put it in the box. Which is right there.

The answer, of course, was no.

In fact, all the mail from our town goes on a truck that leaves here just before 6:00pm, and is driven to the mail terminal in Tacoma, some 80 miles (130km) away... where it is sorted, run through the machinery, stamps are postmarked and then-- very early in the morning-- it is put on a truck and driven 80 miles back to town.

So-- in short-- my letter which needed to travel two feet in fact went on a 160-mile journey to get delivered.

Now, I'm sure there are perfectly good "logistics reasons" why local mail isn't kept and sorted locally... but the whole thing just struck me as rather ridiculous.

How about YOU? Do you have any interesting stories of "lacking logic" and extreme inefficiency to share? Things that just don't make sense? Leave a comment-- would love to hear from you!

(As always, all text and images by the author unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)

Look on the bright side: “The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." - Eugene McCarthy, US Congressman 😀

Well, you've got a point there...

I've got one for you: I recently deposited a check in my credit union and they put a hold on it for nine days. In these days of instant communication, there is absolutely no common sense reason for this.

Reminds me a bit of the $0.01 refund check from my former insurance company... which is pinned to our corkboard at home as a reminder of complete idiocy.

I once opened a bank account with one thousand dollars in the bank trough the teller, and when I checked my receipt, it said that I had only two hundred dollars available. The teller said that there was nothing that she could do, that I had to wait for three business days for my (cash) funds to be released.

That is incredibly lame. Reminds me a bit of some 20 years ago when I ended up "firing" what was then BankOne as my business bank because they had instituted a policy of charging customers $1.50 per $1000 to count cash (bills) with bank deposits.

That's ridiculous but typical of large companies and or government!!

Everything is elevated to its highest level of INefficiency, it seems.

This is nuts! On our street, we have two boxes that we can deposit letters to be mailed in -- one for local destinations and one for non-loca. If they had a system like that, it would hardy require any extra effort as the sender would do the sorting for them.

It's true... and your system was normal in several other countries where I have lived in the past. But around here it seems that "would make too much sense."