Unionized Postal Service model of incompetence and inefficiency

Dear Editor,

In the Age of Internet the U.S. Postal Service is typically called "snail mail" ... A euphemism that, while expressing the pace of the thing, does little to reveal why this cadre of drones moves mail slower than molasses travels uphill in the winter. The cause is an entrenched culture of self-serving stupidity, one that propagates and preserves inefficiency to a degree reserved especially to Fed Gov Inc.

The Postal Service does its level best to ensure that every piece of mail entrusted to its "care" will get shuttled through as many "sorting" locations as the union's contract negotiators can manage to affect. Thus, a piece of first-class mail requires 7 days to travel from Stratton to Omaha, and 12 days to arrive in Stratton from Oklahoma City, OK. This is why phone bills arrive with but a few days remaining until the due date. This is why your payment of same lands upon the creditor's desk "a little late."

To demonstrate the dazzling brilliance of those clever individuals running our postal system, I need only mention that every piece of first-class mail sent from Stratton to another address -- in Stratton -- travels to North Platte for "sorting." This is about as efficient as driving from Nebraska to California via Canada. I suspect it is the same flavor of FUBAR (look it up) for every hamlet, village and town in Nebraska; and likely so across the nation. Now why is that? Well, dear cornhuskers, it's all about "unit count" -- and how every post office must reach a certain quota of "throughput" to justify its contingent of "highly skilled" workers. This is not the exception to the rule, it is the rule -- and it is time to fire the geniuses who have a vested interest in maintaining the asinine arrangement.

Rural post offices -- those stations having perhaps two souls attending the requisite duties -- get clipped hours or closed, while big city behemoths keep their lucrative rackets running at our expense. Get the picture? This is why it costs 49 cents -- near half a buck -- to mail a first-class letter two blocks down the street from where you live. This is why the cost of parcel delivery is obscene. This is one more example of why public sector unions need to be outlawed. They are nothing more than self-serving leviathans of institutionalized incompetence, whose sole raison d''tre is to maximize cost and minimize efficiency.

May I suggest we each contact our U.S. Congressman and Senators to express our "deep satisfaction" with this racket? Perhaps a flood of complaints, asking why a letter need travel 100 miles for "efficient" delivery to a location that is around the block from where you live, will capture their attention. It sure as hell got mine.

Bruce C. Desautels,

Stratton, Nebraska