Word: postally
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According to the French postal ministry, the pneu was obsolete and unprofitable, handling fewer than 605,000 messages in 1983, compared with 2.7 million a decade ago. The fact is that the ministry had actually stopped installing pneumatic tubes in all new post offices some time ago, thus converting the system into a sort of hybrid messenger service. The technique is easily recognized: first let the system deteriorate, then announce that usage is declining, so service must be curtailed and/or prices must go up. It sounds just like the New York City subway. The French postal ministry now offers "postexpress...
...London, just after World War II, the older generation complained that the entire postal system was going to perdition. There were only three deliveries a day in these straitened times. Why, before the war, there had been five. One oldtimer recalled that Edward FitzGerald, the translator of The Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, regularly wrote to London friends from his home near Lowestoft, 116 miles away, and counted on his letters being delivered before evening the same day. They had decent railroad service too in those days...
What doomed the pneu and the postal service, of course, was the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell's new invention seemed so much faster, and consequently so much better. This was before the busy signal was invented, or statements like "He's in conference right now. May I have him call you back...
...Postal Service should be profitable [ECONOMY & BUSINESS, April 2]. Thanks to Congress, it is immune from paying damages that result from bungled mail delivery. I learned the hard way. My passport, which was sent by certified mail, lay in the San Francisco post office for two weeks awaiting delivery. The Postal Service deserves the ridicule piled...
Thank you for your article on the U.S. Postal Service. I have recently been hired to operate one of the automated bar-code sorters that you described, and am amazed at the speed and efficiency of this machine. Before my appointment, I had the impression that many people working in the post office were "coasting" in a well-paying civil service job. This is not the case. The increased productivity should in part be attributed to the attitude of the service's workers. The cooperation and communication between management and labor are the best I have experienced...