Mail Delivery

Post office's service is not letter perfectPostage stamp prices are due to increase very soon. I'm having a problem with this.At my residence we get at least three to four pieces of mail a week that do not belong to us; either the name or address is incorrect. At my work place, which has a different zip code, we get four to five pieces of mail a week that is delivered incorrectly.I have checked with my neighbors, and they have the same problem. Also, the post office in my area is closed during lunch time and closes at 4 p.m., which makes it impossible to mail packages, buy stamps, etc., if a person is employed.

A few weeks ago, a resident of Barkwood Road called to say she was thrilled her mail service had improved after an article ran in the Anne Arundel County Sun about problems she and her neighbors were having.For the past three years, service on the small street in Glen Burnie had gotten progressively worse, residents said, and their complaints to the Glen Burnie Post Office had gone unheeded.Residents complained that when it snowed, they'd get no mail delivery. They claimed the mail was delivered to the wrong houses so often that they had worked out their own system to exchange mis-deliveredletters.

Over the years, Jim Shriver has amassed his own personal archive of his family's illustrious history. Even so, the Union Mills resident, like many long-time Carroll residents, has always been intrigued by one particular historic marker in front of the former U.S. Post OfficeBuilding on Westminster's Main Street. That marker commemorates the creation in April 1899 of the nation's first Rural Free Delivery Route - often called the first "post office on wheels" - and Edwin Shriver, the man who created it, who happens to be Jim Shriver's distant cousin.

WASHINGTON - Mail delivery in Sen. Patrick J. Leahy's office goes like this: Aides to the Vermont Democrat open the windows, slip on rubber gloves, sift through letters and then, in the most disquieting part of the daily ritual, start worrying about feeling sick. It is not anthrax they fear, but its antidote. In recent weeks, some congressional aides have complained that mail on Capitol Hill, all of which is being irradiated to kill anthrax and other deadly agents, is making them ill. They say the mail is causing skin irritation, headaches and nausea, as well as tingling, bleeding and the taste of metal in their mouths.

We're on a collision course with ChinaIt's a wise strategy in diplomacy and most other fields of endeavor to avoid getting on a collision course, especially a public one.We are playing "chicken" with China over the issue of human rights, and if neither country blinks the economic wreckage could seriously hurt both nations.China's aging dictators believe that whatever they do to their own people (and to the Tibetans) is an "internal" matter that is none of our business.They're convinced that our greed and economic self-interest will force us to tolerate their behavior.

RESEARCH CONDUCTED for the U.S. Postal Service confirms something that required no research, namely, that mail delivery can be pretty sluggish.The joy of science, however, is that it attaches numbers to things. And in this case, the researchers found that when they mailed 425,000 envelopes and packages to 5,000 destinations throughout the U.S., an average of only 81 percent fulfilled the promise of overnight delivery. For second-day delivery -- the scheduled time is linked to distance -- the success average was 74 percent.

If you listen to Scott Wallace, it seems obvious that he was arrested for a ridiculous reason. He simply wanted his mail delivered.That's right. Like many residents of big cities, he is unhappy with his mail delivery. But unlike others, he was tossed into jail.It happened this way:Last January, Wallace, 32, a theatrical casting agent, and his wife rented a big rehabbed house on Chicago's Near Northwest Side.They had been living in an apartment about a mile away and filed their change of address with the local post office.

Once as much of a test of a civilian government's effectiveness as collecting the garbage and keeping the peace in the streets, the delivery of packages and letters via a government postal service has undergone tremendous changes since the days when Benjamin Franklin got the unenviable task of being the nation's first postmaster general. In the United States, it became evident nearly a century ago that there was money to be made by delivering packages more quickly and reliably than the U.S. Postal Service.

Boston. -- I have a friend who writes letters. Real letters, on real stationery, with a real pen. What is more unusual, she mails them. I hate to date her like this, but she goes to the mailbox on the corner of her street and casually feeds it envelopes full of her hopes and dreams.I, on the other hand, have joined the legions of Americans who now regard using the mails as risk-taking activity. I think of the mailbox as a slot machine. I never gamble on it more than I can afford to lose. I feed it at 29 cents a shot, wave the envelopes goodbye, and then place my bet on how many days it will take to get to its ZIP code.

The Q: Clay Seeley of Owings Mills believes he receives his mail based on the whims of his mail carrier, claiming that the "post office is very inconsistent in their delivery practices." Seeley said he had been living at his home for six years when a friend from Georgia had tickets to a stock car race mailed to Seeley's address. "If he couldn't make the trip, I would use them," Seeley said. "The arrival date came and went with no tickets. My friend called to tell me that the race track had called to tell him that the tickets had been returned, `No Such Person at this Address.