Why the US. Post Office is also Managed like the Soviets of 1972

© 2024 Mark McWiggins

The U.S. Post Office is also a 1972 manifestation of the Large Bureaucratic Organization managment style. The tagline is “We Deliver for you” but it should be more like “We keep our safe government jobs by following the rules.” Here’s my story.

We were staying in a local hotel with unreliable power and had to unplug and replug the cords numerous times to get computers and phones plugged in. I was upset by this before thinking it through, that a mechanical device like that can only stand so many unplugs/replugs before it fails.

This is why smart businesspeople have a second suitbag full of all their cords and electronics. I have another power adapter coming next Tuesday and am going to save it for just this eventuality.

But back to the Post office. I ordered a new power cord from Amazon. I goofed and put ‘101 Dorning Road’ rather than ‘109 Dorning Road’ …

The postal carrier came in at 9:35 a.m., saw only one property on the road, 109, and looked in her rule book and sent it back to the shipper (Amazon) — really not that far; I know they have a local ship point in Kent WA, 69 miles from here.

I finally got on my neighbor’s computer just after 4:30pm and found this. I stayed on the phone with the national USPS people to no results, drove like a bat out of hell to go the 2.9 miles to the local post office, only to be told that it wasn’t there.

So: (1) Call your local post office instead of the local number (2) keep an extra set of power cords for your tech and (3) write your congressman to give local postal people the autonomy to deliver for customers just outside the rule book in any creative way they can. In my case if they had just asked my landlord, he’d have told them that it was shipped back.

Amazon will finally deliver all this stuff next Tuesday (7/23/2024) …

That’s it … best of luck with your own power cords!