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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Michael "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." This is the official motto of the United States Postal Service (no joke!). The motto is borrowed from the ancient Greeks, 430 BC. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote this sentence about the riding messengers of Xerxes, the King of Persia.
Mail carriers don't enjoy the best reputation here in America. In the TV series "Seinfeld," the mailman "Newman" always calls in sick when it rains, hides bags of undelivered mail in the basement, and claims that zip codes are meaningless.
But it has nevertheless amazing features: So a letter that does not weigh more than 2 ounces (32g) costs only 37 cents, no matter where to be delivered in the entire USA, even to Hawaii or Alaska. For heavier shipments, price depends on the distance to be covered.
In Figure 1 you can see typical American mailboxes. They are not locked, anyone can open the flap. When the postman comes, he opens the flap and puts the mail in.
In inner cities, there are also often mailboxes that look like their German counterparts, but are simply holes in the wall, and the mail simply falls inside the house after being dropped in.
In suburbs or rural areas, the mailman drives through the area in a right-hand-steered car. Cars with the steering wheel on the right side are usually only found in countries with left-hand traffic, but this special construction has the advantage in the US that the mailman can pull up to the right side and throw the mail into the mailbox without getting out of the car. Sitting on the right side in the front of the car, however, he can hardly see to the left in the back, and therefore the mail car has several oversized mirrors so that the driver can safely drive the monster from mailbox to mailbox.
With the booming eBay phenomenon, more and more people are sending their junk, which others have bid on in auctions, by mail. The usually antiquated-looking USPS has come up with something new: on the internet, on the website usps.com, you can create a mailing label with a barcode, print it out on paper or self-adhesive labels with your home printer, and pay with a credit card right away. You have to specify the exact weight and dimensions of the package, and the USPS website shows how much postage it costs. Up to one pound it's $4.50, up to two pounds it's $8.50 for the farthest distances within America.
With the label available through the new service, which has a printed tracking number, you can then track it on the Internet to see where the package is and if the lucky recipient has already received it. And USPS version of the originally genius service invented by the private delivery company UPS doesn't cost a cent more!
If you then drop off the package at the post office, you don't have to queue up, but just slide it to the next clerk, because everything is already done. Or, you just give it to the postman who is currently delivering the mail in the neighborhood. By the way, this is common in America: The mailman not only delivers mail, but also takes freshly stamped new mail. In big cities this is rather unknown, because the postmen are totally stressed there, but in rural areas it is quite normal to put the sent mail in the tube-shaped own mailbox and bend up the red signal as shown in Figure 1. Before the mailman then puts in the delivered mail, he takes out the freshly stamped one that has been prepared there and later hands it in at the post office.
For heavier packages, the "Ground" services of private delivery companies like UPS and Fedex are cheaper than the US Postal Service. Instead of sending it by plane, heavy cargo is sent by "Ground" shipping, i.e. by truck across the continent, and can be tracked with a tracking number to see how the heavy iron is carted through the individual states. A real thrill! For example, I once sold a 50 lbs computer printer on Ebay to a gentleman in New York City, who paid the 39 dollar Fedex postage without complaint, and after a week and 3000 miles by truck, received the printer intact.
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