The elections over but the damage to the United Post Office ability to efficiently get mail out may last for a long time. #45’s appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said it was a cost cutting measure to get rid of these machines citing declining mail volume. The most important machine removed was the Delivery Bar Code Sorter machines (DBCS).
“The people who run and maintain -- and who were being told to dismantle -- these machines tell CNN they can sort roughly 30,000 envelopes an hour”
The problem is DeJoy did not have a plan on what to do with the mail that still need to be sorted. My father worked for the U.S. Postal service for forty-three years in the Railway Post Office. For most of his working life his primary route was between New York and Pittsburgh. These men, and they were all men, also carried Government issued side arms incase of attempted train robberies.
Each man had to know the name of every little teeny tiny town in the state in which they were sorting mail. If you would have asked my father the name of any town in Pennsylvania he could tell you. He had to know this information by memory. They sorted the mail eight hours on the way to Pittsburgh and eight hours coming back to Philly or New York. Not only that, they were not allowed to make mistakes. They got tested every, I think it was, six months. If they made a certain number of mistakes, the person would lose their job. The cycle of testing never stopped and went on for decades.
Once that train started the mail for the small towns on the route had to be sorted and ready to be thrown out of a moving train to be caught by an electronic arm as they approached that town. Their working spaces spaces were tiny and the pressure to get the mail sorted efficiently was intense. Plus the Black men had to deal with anger by their white colleagues who demonstrated they didn’t think a black man should have, what was then, a very good job. Therefore the black men were constantly harassed by the white men. They knew if they got in a fight that would be the end of their jobs, so they endured the harassment. An aside, when they got to Pittsburgh where they had to spend the night they could not stay in the hotels as the white men did. They had to find their own accommodations in the black part of town.
However, all of the men black and white took great pride in being part of a well run postal service and getting things right. When the mail got to the towns the mail was sorted by experienced people too. Then the mail sent out across the city. In the local post offices in big cities it was again sorted for delivery.
When those mail sorting machines were broken and destroyed sorting mail became a nightmare. You see in recent years by the time the mail got to the local post offices it was racked and rolled. That means it was already sorted for delivery to the various residences and business in the neighborhoods The collision of the pandemic, and the explosive growth online shopping further added to the nightmare scenario which the U.S. Postal service is experiencing.
When those machines were taken out and destroyed long gone were the people who once knew how to sort volumes of mail by hand. That is why it may take a very long time to make a once proud institution viable and efficient again.
The legacy of an inefficient administration will plague all us who are dependent on an efficient mail service for a while longer.
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