The US Postal Service and us

No one wants to feel like a loser. But if you ever should want a reason to hate yourself a little more, then do what I did last Monday, April 18, Tax Day. Finish and sign your returns that day. Don't file early or electronically. Procrastinate. After dark, drive your returns to the post office to drop them off, so the envelopes will bear the April 18 postmark. Then, endure the next two hours.

In the days before electronic filing, last-minute filers headed to the post office. Postal workers with big bins stood at curbside. They collected returns from motorists whose cards crept forward as last-minute filers handed over the envelopes through car windows. In San Diego, this used to happen at the Midway Central Post Office - a hulking, rat-gray concrete structure on Midway Drive. In those days, Midway CPO's neighbors included Deja Vu Showgirls, a striptease club across the street. On the evening of Tax Day, the club would station a couple of dancers out in the parking lot to jiggle and encourage last-minute filers to come in after mailing their returns. One year one of them held up a sign that read "Come on In and Get an Extension!" I wonder how much Deja Vu's business has fallen off on Tax Day since Midway closed last year.

This year the IRS estimated that over 5 million Americans waited until April 18 to file their returns. But early last Monday evening, the fact I had 5 million fellow citizens for company offered cold comfort. I found myself signing my returns at home at around 7 p.m. Earlier that day, I had gone online, to see where I should go to drop them off. I found a news article which read: "Procrastinators have only one option in San Diego if they want to file their federal tax returns at the last minute Monday .... the main post office at 11251 Rancho Carmel Drive[.]" That was 22 miles away. I fired up the Ford, hit the freeway, and headed up Interstate 15.

When I arrived at the post office at Rancho Carmel Drive, the counters were dark, closed and locked. A line of people snaked back from a single automated postage machine. I counted 27 people in the line. It was 8:20 p.m.

Nearby, the half-dozen USPS employees on their shifts walked back and forth, to no visible purpose. One was a nice woman in a navy pantsuit. Another was a handsome young man with heavily tattooed arms, a red T-shirt, and no attire suggesting he worked for the post office. As he walked toward a door, someone in the line tried to ask him a question. He didn't slacken his pace as he replied, "I'm on my lunch right now." Somewhere, a telephone rang endlessly. Whoever was calling was a patient person indeed. Evidently the USPS did not employ voicemail technology at the Rancho Carmel Drive facility.

In 1792, Congress enacted the first major postal law. It prohibited the private transmission of any letter or packet "on any established post-road ... whereby the revenue of the general post-office may be injured." The monopoly Congress handed to the Post Office included criminal sanctions against anyone who dared trespass on it. Section 1696 of the Private Express Statutes still says this about that: "Whoever establishes any private express for the conveyance of letters or packets, ... shall be fined ... or imprisoned ... or both." In north Jersey, the Dimeo crime family enforced its own monopolies over trash haulage routes and untaxed cigarette sales in a similar way, only without the express authorization of the U.S. Congress.

The line inched forward. The nice woman in the navy pantsuit now stood at its head, helping each customer with the keystrokes. But now she said something alarming: "The machine's acting weird." It was 10 p.m., two hours before the deadline. This was not good. She produced a key at the end of a long chain. She unlocked the machine. She pried it open. It looked like a big angry steel crocodile, jaws agape, with paper and gears inside. She squatted down on the tile, her hands inside the machine. We all watched, helpless. I thought of the term "going postal," which Merriam-Webster defines as follows: to suddenly behave in a very violent or angry way. "Here's where it happens," I thought.

I uttered my worst fear: The machine was broken, the nice lady in the pantsuit wouldn't be able to fix it, there was nowhere else to go at this hour, no one would be able to stick return receipts onto envelopes, and IRS would hit us all with penalties and interest for missing the deadline. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Each year, the USPS loses billions of dollars. Electronic communications, online bill paying, and services like Paperless Post have caused first class mail volume to plunge. Other countries in the same situation have privatized their postal systems or opened them up to competition, but not the U.S. The USPS still enjoys a legal monopoly on delivery of first class mail (letters under 13 oz.) and standard mail (bulk advertising items). It borrows billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury at subsidized interest rates. It is exempt from all state and local taxes and fees. It has an expensive union workforce whose pay on average exceeds that of comparable private-sector workers and which has sometimes resisted the automation of postal functions. I wondered if the single postage machine in a building staffed by several humans on this night attested to that.

The navy pantsuit lady closed the jaws of the machine and pronounced it fixed. The line resumed its snail-like crawl. Now the tattooed guy took over at the head of the line, to help people who were too slow. Every couple of minutes, he slapped the machine, like your dad slapped the side of the balky family TV set in the 1960s. I turned around and laughed out loud.

By 10:25 p.m., I had reached the front of the line at last. I bought my postage, stamped my envelopes, and dumped them in a collection bin. By 11:30 p.m. I was back home and in bed. I lay there feeling a mixture of self-hatred and satisfaction that the deed was finally done. I thought about the long line, the single machine, and how it might all be different if the USPS were privatized. The USPS has said that is it the "one government agency that touches every American on a daily basis." It had sure touched me tonight.

In a time when electronic communications bind the nation together in a way that Congress in 1792 never could have envisioned, preserving the USPS monopoly so that we can receive mostly junk mail in our mailboxes seems like an anachronism. If Donald Trump is elected president, maybe he'll do something about that.

In the meantime, somehow we all got through it last Monday night at Rancho Carmel Drive. And, as tedious and painful as it seemed, nobody went postal.

Dan Lawton is the principal of Lawton Law Firm in San Diego.