THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 31, 1996 TAG: 9601310011
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 35 lines
I was more than a little interested in the letters Jan. 4 about the foot-dragging U.S. Postal Service.
When I was a kid some 60 years ago, you could get a letter delivered anyplace in the USA in three days for 3 cents. Now for 32 cents you are lucky to get it there in a week. You could do better with a dog sled or a 40-mule team.
Like a lot of other people, I moved my mailbox from the house to the street at the imperative of the USPS so that the carriers could sit in their right-hand-drive vehicles and save themselves all of those exhausting footsteps to and fro.
Now I am the one who has to get fully dressed and get a shoe full of water on my 60-foot round trip to the mailbox that has been left open and is chock-a-block with trash mail.
To cap all of this off, the good old computerized post office refuses to give out forwarding addresses of tenants who move owing rent. This fine piece of convoluted logic and interference into my personal affairs so far has cost me about a thousand bucks. It is an open invitation to every rent-skipping dead-beat bum on the East Coast to rip me off.
How about a little help, Mister Postmaster?
RUSSELL J. WATERFIELD
Virginia Beach, Jan. 4, 1996 by CNB