The Postman Goeth

I know that’s not politically correct. But, “the letter carrier goeth,” just didn’t work. I am well-aware that women have been delivering the goods for the U.S. Postal Service for a long time now. The regular on our route and the occasional substitute both are women who do good work.

Unfortunately for the men and women of the postal service they are working for a dying outfit.  The latest pleas to Congress for financial relief cite a $5 billion dollar budget deficit and more of the same in the future if major changes are not made.

Perhaps “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” could stop postal workers from performing their duties, but e-mail, Facebook posts, tweets, twitters, and electronic transfers are doing them in.  Recently, our rural mailbox has been empty on one or more delivery days a week.  That has never happened before.

Going . . . going . . .

No matter what Congress does, the trend to less snail mail will continue.  We now do most of our banking and some purchasing electronically. We rarely write a personal letter to anyone; it’s so much easier and faster to dispatch an e-mail to friends and family. That’s been a monumental switch for some, including me.  My mother and I exchanged hand-written letters almost every week from the time I left home at age 17 until she died at 86.

Although Mom and I pasted three-cent stamps on our letters when we started corresponding, and the cost increased only to a dime or so during the many years we exchanged letters, we were desirable customers for the postal service.  First class mail was the big money maker—easy to sort and deliver in big volumes. It and parcel delivery subsidized other services.

Now, even the junk mailers who get reduced rates have cut down on their postal business as they increase their advertising on web pages.  For many years, my hometown newspaper arrived by mail for a cut-rate second class charge.  A few months ago, I converted the subscription to electronic delivery. My cost was considerably lower, and of course the news arrived more promptly.

Congress delivered a hard blow to the postal service years ago when they deregulated parcel delivery.  As a result, UPS and Fed Ex have skimmed off a lucrative part of the business. That is nice for them, but it helped drive the postal service to the wall.

The postal service recently once again asked Congress to allow it to discontinue Saturday deliveries to save a bundle of money.  The proposal has come up before, only to be met by deaf Congressional ears.  Ditto the idea of closing unneeded post offices in small towns.  The latter refusal is hard to understand, because mail services to urban areas have subsidized rural deliveries since the U.S. Postal Service began, and that was long before every rural resident had a car or truck. 

Some say the postal service needs to be more creative by finding new ways it can serve.  They cite examples such as France, where post offices service small savings accounts.  Fat chance of something like that happening in the U.S., where branch banks and credit unions abound.

Actually, the trend here has been in the opposite direction.  A small post office issued my social security card when a proud father took me there years before I started my first job. Post offices don’t issue social security cards anymore.  In fact, you can apply for one online, in a process said to take about 15 minutes. 

Merely shutting down the postal service won’t do.  Many of our rural areas, including some close to our home, can’t get computer services.  The nation needs big expansions of broadband coverage before the letter carrier becomes extinct.

Letting the postal service bleed to death over the next few years also is not a good solution.  It should be phased out in an orderly manner over a long time.  For starters, eliminating Saturday deliveries would cause no problem for us, and I doubt it would have much impact on others.

We must drive five miles to the nearest post office, but two miles farther down the same road is another one.  One would do nicely for two cities whose combined population is less than 8,000.

Listen up Congress.  Do what the postal service people are asking you to do.  They are in the midst of a lethal decline that is not going to reverse or stop.

 

The Price is What?


A few years ago, when beautiful wife Sandy and I were young marrieds, we had to watch every penny to stay above the poverty line. Included in our little family was a lovable poodle named Mitch—for Mitch Miller, the sing-along star of TV fame. Trust me; there really was a resemblance between the jovial band leader and our favorite pooch.


We wanted all the best for Mitch so, despite our meager bank account, when doggie problems came up we promptly took him to a veterinarian of good repute. Dr. Shebanek had a degree from Ohio State as a credential, and a pleasant dog-side manner that made clients want to return whenever professional care was indicated. After several visits, we noticed the bill was identical for quite different services.


We began to refer to the good vet as “Twenty-dollar Shebanek.” We paid that amount every time we put Mitch in his care. Perhaps the limited fee schedule was a way of simplifying his bookkeeping.


Nearly a half century and lots of cost inflation later, we noticed a certain parallel. Sandy’s computer went soundless. Our favorite expert couldn’t fix it. It was repaired at the local techie place. Cost: $200.


This happened about a week after a blogger from Ohio reported her computer developed a mysterious ailment, which her electronic expert friend couldn’t fix. It went into the shop for repairs. Cost: $200. Just after Sandy’s puter returned to duty a blogger in Virginia said his machine went whacko and was sent off for treatment because he could not find a cure. Cost: $200.


We just don’t know what to call the repair nerds. Maybe, $200 geeks? Doesn’t seem to have much pizzazz to it.

Grappling with Gremlins

Some researcher desperate for a new problem to ponder might shed light on this question: Why do more typos and other obvious errors appear in compositions produced solely on computer screens than in those appearing in ink on paper? It baffles me, but I know the difference is real.

I can proofread and correct even brief e-mail messages several times and miss a boo boo or two. It’s frustrating, it’s irritating, and it isn’t all due to advancing age. For some time, I’ve noticed the tendency of writers of all ages to produce more than a normal amount of typos and bloopers when they do all their work electronically.

Mal Furniss, retired research entomologist, caught a dandy when he read the July 16 post to this blog. He noted my statement: “Their family has operated the farm where we stayed for about 200 years.” He commented, “No wonder your blog is named Oldgeezer.” Furniss should have proofread the blog name, but, oh well, his version conveyed the message.

I’m not a day over 150, and we really only stayed at the farm for three weeks. I went back and fixed the goof. Thankfully for me, this can be done in internet “publishing.” In paper publishing, your errors stay on the record forever. Perhaps the ability to go back and correct stories is one reason much “breaking news” reporting on the internet is so inaccurate and sloppy.

Before computers became the tools of the trade, when Furniss was a project leader and I was an editor at the Intermountain Research Station, perfection was the goal in scientific publishing. Authors, reviewers, editors, and proofreaders worked hard (at least most of them were dedicated) to ferret out and correct any mistake of any kind. In retrospect, it may have been overkill. With humans doing the work perfection was elusive, but excellence was achieved often. Errata seldom could be found in scientific journal articles or reports issued by research institutions.

This no longer was true when I briefly returned to work at the Intermountain Station in 2004. While compiling a history, I read hundreds of publications written by scientists. Typos were much more prevalent in works produced in the previous ten years than those issued earlier. This quality change seemed to coincide with abandonment of “perfect proofreading” by scientific organizations and publishers. They had started to rely on computer spelling checks and editing programs. Both miss quite a bit.

The highest quality proofreading requires two people. One reads the proofs aloud. The other compares the narration to the manuscript. The reader spells every word that is even a bit unusual and tells the manuscript holder whenever he or she encounters a punctuation mark, capitalized or italicized word, or the start of a new paragraph. If the work is long, readers tire and begin to miss things, so assignments are traded at intervals. The workers exchange the manuscript and the proofs when they change roles.

At the Intermountain Station, our proofreaders used some interesting abbreviations to speed their work. In proofreaderese, parenthesis was “paren.” Quotation mark was “wrap.” Hyphen was “hi.”

Newspapers, at least the ones I worked for, didn’t have the time or staff for the kind of meticulous work research organizations did. One person quickly read proofs and marked corrections, consulting the typed copy only when something seemed questionable.

Because I was a small-time “independent editor” in both my newspaper jobs, no one but me edited my writing before it went to typesetters. Without a sharp-eyed editor checking on my work, quite a few literary atrocities found their way from my typewriter into print. Huge amounts of word processing must be done very quickly in the newspaper world, so bloopers and typos are not hard to find in even the best products.

Several weeks ago, I ordered new business cards from the publisher of the local shoppers guide. I carefully went over every word with the lady who took my order, and left an error-free typed version. The proof I received for approval had four typos. The lady was embarrassed. She admitted they had been exceptionally busy, and skipped proofreading for my little job except for looking at the words on a computer screen. Normally, she said, everything going through their shop was printed out and proofread by two people.

That didn’t surprise me. I had been scanning the shoppers guide for six months, and commented several times on the minimal number of errors in the weekly issues. When I got home, I told Sandy I had discovered why the quality of the guide was so high.

Two days later, Sandy handed me the newest edition of the shoppers guide. She had circled a blatant mistake in a large heading in a big ad. Nobody’s perfect.