Seriously? How badly can our government run one of its oldest agencies? That's a rhetorical question. I'll illustrate.
A few months ago, the post office removed the machines that allow you to buy your own damn stamps without waiting in line. These hardly maintained machines failed to offer a wide array, but if you wanted a basic book of stamp, you could get them from the machine without standing in line. That point is key because standing in line at the post office ranks among the most bleak of all waiting experiences, down there among waiting in the gynecologist's office. (Topping the waiting list is Starbucks, Target and any bakery with cupcakes. Any of those situations involving a crying baby immediately falls to the bottom of the list.)
In response to the revoked self-service option, the USPS office didn't add additional counter employees. No big surprise there. Apparently, instead of stocking and servicing an army of mechanical devices, the USPS wants you to buy stamps from their website and have their carriers bring them to you. Not like the government agency is into efficiency or anything, but that sounds efficient enough; the guy (or woman; I'm never home to see the mail arrive) is coming to my house anyway.
OK, I'm game. It's the holiday season, and I'm ordering stuff online already. Instead of walking to the post office and hazarding a wait in line, I will get online and stock up on stamps like I've never stocked up before. But when I get online and select the stamps I want, the USPS website wants me to create a user identity with a password that complies with these strict rules:
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Minimum 8 characters, at least 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, and 1 number |
Are you kidding? Whatever qualifying password I can invent I will never remember in a million, zillion years! Is the USPS that concerned about website security? They don't even lock the door to most of their locations! Plus, any dude and his hick cousin can just take my mail out of my mailbox and never get caught. But they want my password to be uncrackable by KGB agents?
I do not understand why they make it so difficult to get stamps. This is not the behavior of an agency threatened by computers. This is an organization guaranteeing its own obsolescence.
That's a pretty standard-issue complexity requirement for an organization which wants to be able to claim due diligence when someone's account gets cracked.
There is nothing worse than the post office. I swear, imagine if every business we encountered were run with the attitude of the USPS; they KNOW there's no competition, so why bother being nice, or helpful or well, even remotely efficient!