Mail Service

Patty Arrington of Glen Burnie says she gets her neighbors' mail, and vice versa, so often that they've worked out their own system for delivering it."We've got each other's phone numbers," she said. "We'll call and say, 'We've got your mail.' "Jeanne Miller, one of her neighbors on Barkwood Road, says if it snows or if cars are parked in the way, she sometimes doesn't get hermail at all.And Fran Cox, also of Glen Burnie, summed up her mail service this way: "It's gotten just about as bad as it can get."

WASHINGTON -- Navy Lt. Gilbert S. Storey, raised in Hagerstown and now stationed in the Persian Gulf, wrote his friend Brad Fulton on Jan. 26 and told of a common complaint among the troops."

Ever wonder why the mail is so late reaching your door, or whether delivery is better in other cities?Rest assured, it is. In most of them.A report that Baltimoreans have the seventh worst mail delivery service in the country has provoked some puzzlement among local postal workers, some suggestions as to what's wrong, and a professed determination at the top to make things better."

Key senators reached a tentative agreement Tuesday to save a mail processing center considered significant to the Eastern Shore economy but left the fate of more than a dozen post offices in the Baltimore region uncertain as they considered a sweeping bill to overhaul theU.S. Postal Service. The underlying bipartisan legislation, which is poised for a vote in the Senate Wednesday, would allow the cash-strapped mail service to inch closer to ending Saturday delivery after a two-year waiting period and also restructure the way it pays retiree health benefits - potentially saving the agency billions of dollars a year.

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.

VATICAN CITY -- For some Italians, dropping an important letter in the mailbox is cause for a quick prayer. Mail sent through Italy's famously unreliable postal service can take weeks or months to get where it's going.But in the heart of Rome is a post office that handles mail efficiently, with no need for divine intervention.Vatican City, the 108-acre island of Roman Catholic Church rule inside the city limits of Rome, is a virtually self-sufficient nation-state with a police force and a pharmacy, a diplomatic staff, a supermarket and a range of other services available to anyone who lives or works within its confines.

Postman Plus, a mail and office service business, opened Nov. 5 at 1359 N. Main St. in the rear of the building.The business is ownedby two couples: Charles and Gail Hillier Varner of Hampstead, and Paul M. and M. Ann Lloyd of Upperco, Baltimore County.The store offers services such as shipping and receiving packagesfrom United Parcel Service, Federal Express and the U.S. Postal Service, wrapping parcels, faxing, photocopying, laminating and gift wrapping, Charles Varner said.The owners also are notaries and offer secretarial and bookkeeping work, he said.

Start Over. Brand New Credit File.The message, stenciled on wooden signs tacked to trees along major thoroughfares in Baltimore and suburban counties, offers encouraging words for credit junkies looking to leave their bad credit ratings behind.But the man selling credit salvation is in fact offering an altered identification that conveniently erases many connections to old credit problems.Officials of government agencies in Maryland and many other states say the practice skirts the edges of fraud and perjury.

Any computer user with a modem can send free electronic mail to military personnel in the Persian Gulf through GEnie, a nationwide on-line information service owned by General Electric.The electronic mail is forwarded to Saudi Arabia, where it's printed, placed in addressed envelopes and delivered by the military postal service."The word we're getting is that letters are getting delivered in as little as two days,'' said Chip Chiappone, GEnie's product marketing manager. "People seem thrilled that they don't have to put up with normal mail delays.

Privacy advocates are concerned that there's one big flaw with Google Inc.'s free e-mail service: The company plans to read the messages. The Internet search company says it needs to know what's in the e-mail that passes through its system so they can be sprinkled with advertisements that Google thinks are relevant. Revenue from those targeted ads will pay for the Gmail service, which began a test last week, offering up to 500 times as much e-mail storage as competing Web e-mail programs from Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.