In an effort to make our lives even more miserable than it already does, the Federal government, through its mismanaged agency the U.S. Postal Service, has notified me that the mail slot in my office door is too low.  I must comply with the U.S. Postal Service’s demand “in order to eliminate delays, reduce misdeliveries and insure speedy delivery of the mail, it is required that each house or business have a visible street identification number and conveniently located mail receptacles that conform to Postal regulations and specifications.” The notice continues, “Your premises lack the essential requirements for carrier delivery as indicated below.”

Luckily our “street identification number” is fine, but our “mail receptacle” (slot) is too low on the door.  According to this mandate, we have “No Door Slot,” or at least not one that is “at least 1.50 inches wide, 7 inches in length and shall not be less than 30 inches from the bottom of the door.”

Even more ridiculous, the U.S. Postal Service advised that our mail slot is a “SAFETY HAZARD.”  Huh?

Thank goodness our mail slot is the right size (3 inches by 14 inches), but it’s only 12 inches from the floor.  Considering that all the doors to the ten offices in my office condominium buildings are exactly the same, with the mail slot being said 12 inches from the floor, and every door has a glass pane in the center, the bottom of which is only 18 inches from the floor, all the owners in our building are screwed.

For us to be able to comply with these absurd regulations, obviously all the doors will need to be replaced.  Obviously the glass panes in the doors will either have to be smaller in order for the mail slot to be 30 inches above the floor, or we will have to forgo glass paned doors altogether, thereby ruining the aesthetics of the buildings.  Obviously, the new doors will have to be custom made.   In the alternative, we could get one of those ugly freestanding mailbox mausoleum looking things, and have it installed in a central location of our complex.  Problem is, there is no central location unless we install the mailbox thing right in the middle of the lovely landscaped atrium between the two buildings.  I’m thinking that wouldn’t look too cool, either.  So, yeah, we’re screwed.

Much like the way Internal Revenue Service forms have numbers at the bottom of the page, the notice we received is in a pre-printed form called “PS Form 1507, March 1988.”  That means this form, and presumably the regulation we are allegedly violating, dates back TWENTY FOUR YEARS.  For some reason, the U.S. Postal Service is just now getting around to figuring out we’re not in compliance with one of their God knows how many antiquated regulations?

I have been in this office since August 22, 2003.  In these almost nine years, we’ve had the same letter carrier since we moved in.  We have never had a problem getting our mail delivered.  On Saturdays or other days when I’m not in the office, our letter carrier has never had a problem putting the mail through our slot.  (Neither has Federal Express, UPS or DHL, for that matter.)

Even more incredibly, in all these years, our letter carrier has not encountered even one “SAFETY HAZARD” delivering our mail.  Go figure.

So, why is the U.S. Postal Service kvetching about our mail slot now, after all these years?  Are they so pissed off at the general public for using free email to instantaneously correspond with someone instead of spending forty five cents on a letter that will probably take days to get to its destination, if at all?  Has the ease with which we can pay our bills online instead of having our checks get lost in the mail really made the U.S. Postal Service that resentful?  Is the Postmaster General just having a really bad year?  What?

Oh, and they gave us a whole ten days to comply.

The way I look at it, the U.S. Postal Service is just one of the many reasons the government needs to get out of the business of doing anything the private sector can do better, cheaper and more efficiently.  Not only is this moronic mail slot regulation itself beyond ridiculous, but the sudden enforcement of such a ludicrous rule is suspect in and of itself.  It’s almost as if the Post Office higher ups have finally realized that theirs is an archaic, money sucking, boondoggle of a government agency, that outgrew its usefulness years ago, and they resent the very public on which they rely for their existence.  Class envy (or in this case, private sector envy) is never pretty.

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”