#MiddleburyCT #USPS #Newspaper
By MARJORIE NEEDHAM
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” may apply to U.S.P.S. mail carriers*, but even they are no match for the system the U.S.P.S. put in place for deliveries of mail like the July issue of the “Middlebury Bee-Intelligencer.” As a result, Middlebury residents whose papers would have been in their mailboxes today will find them missing.
The papers go to the post office with U.S.P.S.-required paperwork. That paperwork until fairly recently was forms the printer filled out. Then the post office declared the only paperwork it would accept had to be generated through its website gateway. All day Thursday, attempts to sign onto the gateway were met with messages like, “Sorry, this website is temporarily unavailable.”
This wouldn’t be so bad if there were a Plan B. Doesn’t every large organization that relies on computers have some sort of Plan B for the inevitable day when the computers don’t work as they should? The U.S.P.S. apparently has no such plan.
Our printer spent an hour on the phone seeking a solution to this problem. We spoke to the postmaster. Couldn’t we at least drop the newspapers there and then email the forms once the U.S.P.S. gateway was back up? Oh, no. That would violate postal regulations and simply could not be done. The printer asked the folks on the phone and we asked the postmaster, “What’s the backup plan?” We were met with silence and a shrug, respectively.
So, dear readers, we shall get your papers to you as soon as the U.S.P.S gets its stuff in order. Do you think they’ll give us a discount on the hundreds of dollars we paid in advance to send out this mailing? (That’s your laugh for the day. You’re welcome.)
*The saying often attributed to the U.S.P.S. carriers actually dates to 500 B.C. and refers to Persian couriers. “Mental Floss” said, “The line was written by Herodotus in paragraph 98, book eight of The Persian Wars, which recounts the history of a war that took place between the Greeks and the Persian Empire from 499 to 479 BCE.”
