I was speaking with an election supervisor who was black for

Posted on: September 5, 2020 at 10:39:13 CT

awhile at the last election. She has been a supervisor at a few companies and also manager at a military records center. She said that government employees would all be fired at a private company. Their sense of entitlement, the ways that they act, their attitudes and so on would just never be tolerated in the private sector.

A couple of days ago I tried to find some information about bulk rates for mailing a newsletter for a nonprofit. I wanted to get the data necessary to make a decision about whether an organization I am involved with should apply for such a permit. I was looking for what the application process entailed, what the costs would be and what the prices would be for mailing out newsletters in bulk.

I had checked first with a couple of postal meter companies. I was told that I would need to go to the local post office where we would be taking the mailings and ask for the Post Master. He said talking to tellers would be useless as they would either tell you upfront that they didn't know that information and couldn't look it up, or they would pretend to know what they are talking about and make stuff up. False information is worse than no information.

First I tried their website. I tried scrolling through their various menus but couldn't find anything on nonprofits. So I tried their search engine using several different search terms. The results were garbage. I got page after page of things that might or might not have the word "nonprofit" in it somewhere, but no info on the process for getting a permit and the pricing therefor nor the pricing for sending out mail once one had such a permit.

Next, I tried calling a couple of local numbers I had saved to see if I could set up an appointment. Those phone numbers had all been disconnected. Next I went to the USPS website to look for the new numbers. They listed local post office addresses, but no phone numbers. Then I tried the 800 # from their website. What a nightmare. It was an automated menu system from hell. As far as I can tell there is no possible way to talk to a human being and the menus are nested within menus within menus and they all have a lot of options you need to listen through and they seem very disorganized and in some ways silly.

I went through them trying to find info on nonprofits but couldn't find any. Some of the options seemed to be for relatively unusual things like sending exotic pets overseas and so on, but nothing for nonprofits. Most of the menus, even the early ones seemed to be missing a "none of the above" options I needed. I tried as many permutations and combinations of the menus as I could stand and gave up... heading off to my local post office.

After waiting in line, I got to a teller who told me that they didn't have a Post Master at that location. After explaining what I needed she said she didn't have any of that information and wouldn't know how to find it, but a technician of some sort (I forgot the title) might know, but she was on vacation. I asked if anyone else might be able to help me & she said that a manager there might be able to help.

I could hear the manager speaking with her in the next room, obviously irritated that she would have to speak with a postal service customer, but she finally came out. She explained that she didn't know anything about that and would not have any way to find out. She gave me a phone number and a name and said I could try her, she might be able to help me.

I went home and called her. She was nice, and was able to give me some of the information, but it sounds like there are charts on things like the various parameters detailing what prices would be. She had to look things up on some "secret"(?) web page(s) and would give me answers on some of the prices for specific questions, such as what it would be if the weight was below 3.5 oz and presorted to 5 digits and fit the size parameters and was within the region. I couldn't get specifics on what was considered "within the region" or prices for any number of other variables.

She recommended that I set up a business account for the organization, giving details about the organization and person in charge, name, address, phone #, email etc. That would give me access to other pages on the website including ones for nonprofits.

It did, but there are a lot of long pages with tons of information, often in typical government legalese full of acronyms and references within them to requirements in other similar documents that one would have to look up... which, of course, make references to yet other documents.

I'm getting info by bits and pieces but the process is time consuming and ridiculous. No private company run the way the post office is run would stay in business for very long.