The US Postal Service Is Suffering

The expansive churning and unending wake of destruction left by the "presidency" of the twice-impeached/four-time-indicted criminal defendent Donald J. Trump has far-ranging repercussions from which I don't think we will ever recover. From beginning to end, and from top to bottom, it played out like a criminal enterprise, with a grifter-in-chief attracting like-minded pickers of the public pocket, and today's blog post focuses on one of those in particular: Louis DeJoy, currently and inexplicably the Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service.

It's bad enough that, thus far, companies in which he has significant financial interests and/or companies that he owns or runs are being awarded sizable contracts from the USPS (see this from Forbes, or this from NBC News, and especially this article from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington).

It's not just dipping deeply into the public trough to line his own pockets and manipulate the awarding of contracts to maximize his companies' income and kneecap their competition. It's also the cynical and nefarious undercutting of the USPS service excellence especially in order to diminish the voting options via mail particularly for Democratic-leaning voters.

It is the larger and expansive impacting of the quality and timeliness of mail service that has become so very galling to me. Within the last year, when I made a concerted effort to be better about communicating with friends especially at birthdays and on special occasions or holidays, I quickly learned that there is no dependable timeframe for when to mail things. So I began attaching stickers of my own to mailed items, indicating when I actually put them into a post office box or dropped them off at a post office location. The first of those is above. Then, I modified it slightly for the Labor Day cards I sent out:

Regular blog readers are also probably among those who have received cards along the way, so some of you know how long it has taken for mail to reach you...

...or to wait in vain for mail that has never arrived. It took two-and-a-half weeks for a birthday card to get delivered to an address here in town, and mail to Oklahoma regularly takes 2-3 weeks. At least one card did not even receive a postmark until four days after I had mailed it. Recently, I had three pieces of mail returned to me with yellow USPS automated stickers saying they were unknown addressees and could not be forwarded.

Quite inexplicably, they had already received USPS barcoding and ZIP+4 codes that were correct for those addresses.

So now I'm just exceptionally angry about how the US Postal Service is being run. When Halloween cards went out, there was another date-stamp sticker to adorn the backs of the envelopes:

Update: Here's the label for the 2023 Christmas card envelope flaps:

And now I've made a yard sign:

All the US Postal Service employees I get to interact with are busting hump and are stretched incredibly thin. I hope they see in this my full support, as well as recognition that their jobs have become even more miserable, especially if a lot of customers are bitching and moaning at them instead of at the political crookedness of the leadership and those who appointed them. I lay it all at the feet of the Chief Enemy of the US Postal Service: Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.