Following up on my post yesterday about the problems of the Post Office from the inside, today I’m going to attack the problems it has in the outside world and how why it’s failing.

Email is killing the “hand written sentiment” and there is no way to change that.  My parent’s generation is on the tail end of the mentality that sitting down, writing letters and putting a stamp on them is common practice.  Problem is that a good percentage of them are already on the Internet and have made the change to electronic mail.

So, how can the post office stay afloat for a few more years if no one is writing letters?

First thing they need to do it to change the amount of time it takes for first class mail to be delivered.  Let the public know that your letter isn’t going to take three days to get somewhere.  Push it up to a week.  There aren’t a lot of things that need to be sent that have to be there within the three day window.  Most people mail their stuff out with plenty of time to get to it’s destination, and if it gets there late it’s not a big deal.  If a person wants something to get somewhere faster then they can use Express Mail and pay the premium price for that service.

If the post office made this change then they could shut down the hubs and the slow the movement of the mail during the weekends, which would raise employee’s morale.   (As I mentioned in my last post.)  Then the post office could stop the delivery of mail on Saturdays.  I know they keep crying about this and saying that they might do it, but they should do it.  If there is no mail delivery on Saturday then you don’t need mail carriers out delivering it.  This would mean you would need less carriers to deliver the mail and less wear and tear on the vehicles and save on fuel consumption.  Deliver the mail 5 days a week.  My 66-year old mother told me that she doesn’t care if she gets mail on Saturday.  Doesn’t make any difference to her, and if a baby boomer says that it doesn’t matter than it really doesn’t matter.

There’s an article saying that the USPS is cutting hours at the rural offices.  The smaller offices is another area that the post office needs to start looking at.  The smaller offices that don’t get a lot of business needs to go one of two routes.  One thing they can do it to shut the offices completely.  Not every town needs a post office.  They don’t need to treat the offices like they are Starbucks, one on every street corner.  The second thing that can be done is for the smaller towns is to stop delivery and give the residents their own post office box.  This could be a slow process, if a post office has a lot of unused PO boxes they can use them to close down some of the carrier routes and have the mail kept internally.  Make the people come to them and not the other way around.  This would also help ensure that the mail is safer than being inside a mailbox that is sitting by the road.

At the stations that are open there needs to be more automation.  At a large station in Tampa they put in machines where you click on the screen, put your mail on the scale and it spits out a stamp for you.  Then you put it in a drop box and you’re done.  No lines to wait in and no front desk person who, most likely, has an attitude problem, to deal with.  Put more of these in the stations.  Give people an incentive to use them.  If you offer them a discount to use them instead of going to the front desk there would be less lines and less need for workers to work the counter.  The smaller offices could just close the counter and put one of these there instead and if the person doesn’t want to use it they could also go to a nearby station that has a person working it.

If the Post Office had any courage they would totally break away from any government assistance and become a totally private company.  A lot of people think that it’s a government agency.  They like to call themselves ‘quasi-government’ so they switch sides whenever they want and not take any responsibility on either side.  If they went private there would be a total rehaul on the way things work.  The would look at ways to become profitable.  With government assistance they don’t have to try hard to make any money, they just stick out their hand and ask their “daddy” to help them.  People would complain that the price of stamps would go up, but like I said before, who really mails things nowadays.

Also, they need to somehow use the Internet to help them out.  For years they thought of the Web as their enemy, but now they need to embrace it.  Their website should be where someone can go for all their needs.  If I want to mail out a letter I should be able to go onto their website and print up a stamp for the cost it would be for me to go to one of their stations to get it.  I don’t want to use a service like stamps.com where I have to pay a monthly fee to use it.  I should be able to buy 1 stamp online for the same price as it would cost me to buy it in person.

So, if the USPS wants to try to stay around for a few more years they need to become a privatized company that offers only weekday delivery with a strong Internet influence.  Without any of these, it won’t be around for much longer.

]]> http://www.coreycharette.com/why-the-post-office-is-failing-part-2-from-the-outside/feed/ 0 http://www.coreycharette.com/why-the-post-office-is-failing-part-1-from-the-inside/ http://www.coreycharette.com/why-the-post-office-is-failing-part-1-from-the-inside/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 13:00:14 +0000 Corey Charette http://www.coreycharette.com/?p=712

In case you live under a rock the Post Office is dying and they are finally realizing that they need to do something about it.

The problem is that this has been going on for a lot longer than they want to admit it.

The first problem with the post office is from the inside and I’ll tell you what’s happening in there.

I worked for the post office for many years around the turn of this century.  I worked at the Tampa hub office overnight sorting mail through a machine for nearly 6 hours and from the early days of me being there I knew that they were destined to fail.

The problem with working there was that the morale was almost nothing.  My hours were from 12:30a until 7:00a.  If you were expecting to have weekends off you needed to have seniority and had to apply for an open position with those days off.  Seniority is king.  Doesn’t matter if you are the best worker there.  If someone has been there longer than you and they apply it’s their’s.  Also, holidays they are still open.  Don’t expect any holiday off, without a lot of seniority.  You will get overtime, but doesn’t make up for having to work on the day.

So why work hard?  It gets you nowhere.

I use to work on machines in teams of 5 people.  Another guy and myself would bust our humps trying to get the mail out as soon as we can.  Not everyone on the team would give their all.  We learned that we shouldn’t be giving 100%, but instead giving 20% so that all 5 of use would be giving 100% total.  We did that and our co-workers weren’t happy.  Why?  Because they actually had to put some effort in it.  They complained to management which takes me to the next problem.

Management has no backbone.  Like most companies managers only do what they have to and if they don’t get in trouble they don’t care.  There was one day when I was working on a team and one of the employees was just standing in the back of the machine while it was backing up.  Management didn’t say a word to him.  He came up to me and asked me to help.  I told him “if he’s not going to do his job I’m not going to do it for him.”  Management stood there and looked at me for a moment before going over there and doing the work.  Instead of telling the lazy worker to do their job they tell the hard workers to do more.  Management needs to be held just as accountable as the employees should, but neither are.

Third thing that grinds the system to a halt internally is the union.  This union is a waste.  Their only purpose is to take your money and the only people that they help are those who are lazy and don’t want to do anything.  The people that I’ve talked to that say the union helped them are the ones that got fired for not doing their job.  There was one guy there that the union saved him his job FOUR TIMES!  Four times you are going to get fired, but they keep you around?  That makes so much sense to try and keep the people that don’t do anything.  That shows other people that they don’t have to work.  The union also bends over backwards for people that scream racist!  There was one Hispanic employee at the company that didn’t do anything and kept trying to apply to be a manager and kept getting turned down.  Eventually, he went to the union and cried that he wasn’t getting promoted because of his ethnicity.  Needless to say, he became a manager shortly thereafter, and still wasn’t doing any work.

So, how could the post office try to fix itself on the inside?

• Try to raise employee’s morale. The post office needs to acknowledge that the mail doesn’t need to move 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week.  They need to let the public know that up front.  Shut down these large hubs on the weekends and only keep open the essential parts of it on the weekends (overseas and overnight mail).  Have the workers work only during the daytime hours.  That will help make people happy.  If they did this they could cut back on the amount of workers they need and save money that way.  Also, holidays should be treated as HOLIDAYS!  If the mail doesn’t get delivered then the workers shouldn’t be there.  There would be a ton of overtime that wouldn’t have to be paid out.
• Hold everyone accountable.  Management needs to grow a pair and take charge.  If an employee is slacking off then they need to be talked to.  If a manager isn’t doing their job they need to be talked to.  If the numbers on one of the machines isn’t up to par and management gets talked to there should be no excuse besides it was the manager’s fault that it wasn’t up to snuff.  Your productivity should be used when applying to other positions in the company.  If you are a harder worker than someone who’s been there twice as long as you then they should be considering you for the position.  Give the employees an incentive to work hard, and that will help move the mail faster.
• The unions need to get a clue.  The union needs to not take up every little complaint that the employees have.  If the union sees that an employee hasn’t done their job over and over again and are still trying to stay around then the union shouldn’t help out.  Three strikes and you’re on your own.  The useless employees shouldn’t be kept around.  They’re not going to work harder if they keep their job.  They know that the unions will save them.  If an employee really wants to keep their job then they can go an get a lawyer. At least lawyers will look to see if it’s worth their time to help out the employee, unlike the unions.

So these few things could easily help the productivity of the USPS from the inside and might actually help keep it around for a few more years.

Being in Kindergarten at that time I spent one summer being friends with a pile of dirt, and that was a great summer!

Before I go on with this post there are a few things I want to let you know:

1. I have never been dropped on my head
2. I have no mental issues whatsoever

My parent’s had purchased my maternal grandmother’s house after her passing and we moved in there for a few years in that late 70s.  My father wanted to make the driveway bigger so we could park 2 cars wide instead of one behind the other.  So, that meant that some dirt had to be removed from the yard, and it was put in the backyard to keep it out of the way.

This dirt was like a playground to me.  I would spend hours sitting out there burrowing tunnels into the dirt trying to make it all the way from one side to the other.  Of course, that never happened, but in the mind of a 5-year old, anything was possible.

That summer I would sit out there for hours on end pushing the dirt around with my Tonka truck, bulldozer and crane.  These were the real metal Tonka trucks that you could drop from an airplane and would only get bent slightly when crashing into the ground.  These toys have been through everything, bent and rusted from where the paint has been removed, but still worked great!

There were a few other kids that lived in the neighbor that were my age, but they lived a little ways away and I was still too young to go on my own to play with them, and I really didn’t care.  I had my dirt to play with.

It’s amazing how dirt could keep a child that occupied.  Nothing could keep me from playing in it, except for rain.  My imagination would go wild I could do anything I wanted with it – build a city, make an underground empire, or just clump it together and try to make dirt balls.

We moved away a few years later, and I never remembered when that pile of dirt was removed from the yard.  Looking back, it’s hard to believe that we survived without technology, but if we didn’t have it we didn’t miss it.

Nowadays, I sit in front of my computer and can do anything that I want.  This is my modern day pile of dirt.

If you remember your health classes in school about the “birds and bees” you need a woman to help you have a baby.

Now, with the 21st century, all you need is a cup, turkey baster, and somewhere to put your seed.

We’re not going to talk about that way or any other way.  We’re going to go with the conventional way of having a child.

In case you didn’t know, you need a woman for this part.

When I say a woman, I mean it could be your wife or your long term partner.  Don’t be heading to the bars on Ladie’s Night trying to pick up woman with the line “Wanna make a baby with me?”  Not only will that get you slapped, but also might get you banned from any drinking establishments within the county.

So, you’ve had a sit down with your partner and told her you’re ready to become a father.  What’s the process you should go to actually conceive?

This is the part where you need to think like a woman.  Slamming a couple of Miller High Lifes and saying “let’s get it on” isn’t the best way to go.  Woman like foreplay.

Foreplay for woman is something totally different than for men.  Woman want to be swept off their feet with romance.  Plan a day that both of you can be intimate without any interruptions.  That means turning off your phone and not posting to Facebook everything you’re doing that night.  She won’t like that.

Now go out and get some flowers.  I know that it’s hard to find flowers when it’s not her birthday or Valentine’s Day, but you can still buy flowers any day of the year.  Now the key word is “buy” flowers.  Don’t be going through someone’s garden and pull up something that might look like a flower.  There are several reasons for this.  The first one is that not everything is a flower.  Some things are weeds or poisonous.  Women don’t like poison ivy.  The second reason is the roots.  She’s going to know that you were a cheapo and didn’t even spend a dollar for flowers.  Go to the florist and get a dozen of her favorite flowers.  If you don’t know what she likes go with roses.  They are a fail safe.

Now onto dinner.  You can take her out to a nice restaurant, but women love when their man cooks for them.  If you plan on cooking for her there are a few rules you must abide by:

1. If it has microwave directions on it don’t use it.  She can taste that it’s premade and that’s a recipe for disaster.
2. Breakfast for dinner is a no-no.  Anyone can make breaksfast.  If little kids can make this for their parents without any help then you should avoid it at all costs.
3. Use a vegetable.  I know, most men don’t like vegetables, and will have potatoes as a substitute.  Cook something with color to it.  Green beans and broccoli are great sides to have with your meal.  If you want a potato also you can have that too.  A twice baked potato takes it to the next level.  Just don’t make it french fries.
4. Have a desert.  The fancier the better.  Don’t throw a couple of scoops of ice cream in a bowl slathered with chocolate syrup.  Bake a cake if you can’t think of anything else.  They’re easy to make and always taste good.  If you want to impress, go any buy a can of fruit filling (cherry is the best) and put some of that between the layers of cake.  That will catch her off guard.

So, now you have your flowers and dinner.  The next thing you need is candles.

Candles add a romantic mood to the meal.  When getting candles make sure that you don’t buy the sticks.  The reason is that you will need candlestick holders and that they might drip wax all over the tables.  That’s more of a pain than anything.  The best ones to get are the ones that come in a glass cup.  They are self contained and easy to clean up.  When buying these try to avoid the strong scented ones.  You don’t want to be eating your food and smelling some weird flowery potpourri crap.  Best candles to get are non-scented or ones with a very mild aroma to them.

Now if you want to have some music playing in the background that’s fine.  I would recommend music if you don’t want to talk.  It would fill up the quietness during the meal.  If you don’t have any romantic or mellow music in your collection you can’t go wrong with some classical music.  Classical is a safe thing to play because there is no lyrics that can ruin the mood and you can get a ton of CDs at the store for almost nothing.

So, now you have everything you need for your romantic evening.  She will remember this evening for the rest of her life, and if you mess it up she won’t let you forget.

Years ago this symbol would have gotten me excited.  There was a wonderful period in our lives when places were offering free WiFi and we thought that this was the future.

Well, I don’t like this future.  Free WiFi is one of the worst things out there and I wish it would go away.

Everywhere you go now has free WiFi.  Whenever I’m out my phone has a notification on it saying that there is WiFi I can connect to, and most of the time, it’s a free connection.

The problem isn’t that there is free WiFi.  The problem is that there are people out there that abuse it.  The local McDonalds has free WiFi and it seems like that there are the same group of people that go in there and sit there for hours on end drinking their $1.00 soda (with free refills) just so they don’t look like they’re mooching.  (Personally, spending a dollar and sitting in a place for three hours still looks like you’re mooching.)  I have also seen people sitting in the parking lot with their computer on the steering wheel surfing the web.

There are so many people that come out of the woodwork to go to this McDonald’s to use the Internet.  I have plenty of stories that I will post in the near future.

Don’t get me wrong, I have used the WiFi at a local Starbucks before, but I don’t just sit there and abuse it.  I do buy a drink every hour to ‘pay’ for it.  Yes, the drinks are close to $5 so at least I don’t feel like I’m abusing the privilege.

Here’s how I think businesses should offer “free” WiFi.

Offer WiFi with a purchase

Plain and simple.  If you are at a coffee place or a fast food restaurant then you should have to buy something.  I think that the WiFi should be password protected and that you get an hour’s worth of WiFi with a minimum purchase amount.  Your receipt has a password that you use to log into the WiFi.  If you don’t use the password within 5 or 10 minutes it becomes inactive and when you log in you have 60 minutes from that point.  After the hour, if you want to use more Internet then go any buy something else.

Hide the power outlets

Love seeing places with free WiFi that has one outlet in the corner and there is this one guy who is sitting there hogging it so he doesn’t ever have to leave the place.

If you want to give people totally free WiFi then hide all the power outlets.  Put locks on them or have a switch in the back that turns them all off so no one can use them. If a person’s battery dies on their laptop then they’ll have to leave.

Kick them out

This is the most difficult one to do because management never wants to tick off their customers.  Of course, if you are sitting in a restaurant for three hours with only a small soda next to you then you are not a customer.

If management starting kicking out the moochers then they might find somewhere else to go.  If they decide to come back and the manager sees that they are ordering only a soda then tell them up front that they only have so much time before they get kicked out.  They might get the idea.

Honestly, I think that restaurants might get more customers if they start posting signs that say “We Don’t Have WiFi At All”.  There might be a group of people that would enjoy going somewhere where people aren’t sitting on their computers all day.

The basic reason is that I’m scared of what might happen.

One of the most common things that people say is that once you post something on the Internet it’s always out there and never goes away.  That might be true, but I don’t want to be one of those people who has to try to hunt and peck around to find something that I posted a half a decade ago on some obscure site.  I want to be able to keep everything in one place that I have control over.

Yes, you have control over what you post in Facebook and on Twitter, but I have one word for you: MySpace.

MySpace was a huge social network before anyone without a school email could even think about accessing Facebook.  We were all there.  I posted my thoughts and stories over there, but times change and people move around from one social website to another.  That’s why I decided to throw everything I write about on my own personal site and send links over to Facebook and Twitter.  Where ever the next big website is that we all move to my personal site will still be the same.  Also, if you only post on these sites you are inside their “walled garden” and it’s difficult for people to see what you are posting unless they are inside that “garden” and following or a friend of yours.  Being outside those walls allows Google to find you and makes it easier for everyone to find your website.

So, if you are not on my Facebook or Twitter page you can always come to this website to see what’s going on.

Why do I have a class ring?

Let me quickly describe what my ring looks like.  It’s gold with a blue sapphire stone in it with the year 1990 on it.  (Yes I graduated THAT LONG ago!).  On one side is our school mascot – the Spartans and the other side I had a computer image put on it.  (Remember that this is 1990 and the Internet wasn’t even something I could have imagined at that time.  Guess I knew that computers were going to be more than just business tools.)

Like most underclassmen, I got my ring during my sophomore year.  It was a great day when we received them.  Everyone had put them on and were proud of being “The Class of ’90.”

Of course, that ring had not just sat on my finger.  Like most kids in high school, it had made it to a couple of girl’s necklaces and on one finger.  Albeit, with some yarn wrapped around it to hold it in place.

Now looking back at that ring all I can see is the $200+ that was spent on it.  I asked people why we got those rings and the usual response was for nostalgia, remember the good (or bad) times we had as teenagers, but I don’t see that.  How can I remember the past from a ring that I never look at?  That doesn’t make sense to me. I can get more nostalgic about high school by looking at my yearbooks.  The pictures in there bring back so many more memories than a gold ring can.

I stopped wearing the ring because I gained weight and it didn’t fit me anymore.  Of course, by then I was out of high school and it felt a little out of place wearing it.  How many times have you seen someone that had definitely graduated high school (or college) and were still wearing their class ring?  Looks awkward seeing this over sized ring with a large piece of colored glass in it.

So, back to my original question?  Why do I have a class ring?

The only explanation that I can come up with is peer pressure.  We all received the booklets the same day during sophomore year.  Getting together in the hallways to discuss what we might want to put on it or what color stone we’re getting.  There was that feeling of ‘impulse shopping’ where you had to have one because you had the catalog and your friends were getting it.

So, I guess that’s why I got a class ring because “everyone else was getting one so I gotta have one.”  Now, I’m going to put it back in the drawer and quickly forget about it.

As my son sits here and makes a quick video about his Skylanders I thought that I should sit down myself and warn all parents out there that if your children ask you to buy this for them under no circumstances DO NOT BUY THEM THIS!

Skylanders is a video game for the major systems.  When you buy it you are buying the starter pack.  Before I go any further I can already see the parent’s out there rolling their eyes because I said ‘starter pack.’  Not only do you get the game, but you get a wireless portal and three characters that you can put on the portal to play in the game.

So, now I’ve said ‘starter pack’, and ‘characters’.  You know where this is going.  Inside the starter pack is a poster of all the characters you can buy.

Go ahead and count.  32.  The cost of these are $20 for a three pack or $10 for each or individually.  But, it doesn’t stop there.

As I kept looking into Skylanders I discovered that there are FOUR adventure packs also.  Each adventure pack comes with one of the above Skylanders, an extra level and 2 power ups that you can use in the game.  Each of these cost another $20.

But wait….there’s more.

It turns out that Toys ‘R Us sells 4 legendary Skylanders.  What they are are 4 regular Skylanders with gold design on them that are more powerful.  So, if you want to make your kid happy you’ll have to get these also.

Unfortunately, as I dug deeper into this hell known as Skylanders I found out that there are 5 ultra rare ones that are all gold or all silver.  These bad boys are almost impossible to get, but if you want to dish out $150 each you can get them online.  For the record, my son will NEVER see these things, but he knows that they’re out there and that’s dangerous enough for me.

For anyone who is old enough to remember, essentially this is a modern day version of Pokemon, where you have to collect them all to make your kid happy.  Personally, I think it’s a kids version of heroin, where there never happy until they get another one to add to their collection.

Activision, the company who made this game, made sure that you need to get as many of these characters as possible to get a 100% in the game.  Besides the fact, that you need to buy the adventure packs to unlock the 4 bonus levels, each level has three stars on it and you have complete all the items on each checklist to get a star.

One of these items is to be able to explore every area of every level.  Every level has areas that can only be accessed by certain classes of Skylanders.  If you look at the above picture there are eight classes of Skylanders.  You need at least one of every class to ensure that you can unlock every area of the game to even attempt to complete the game.

So, if you sit back, do the math and figure it out, it’ll be much easy to avoid this game than to get it for your kid.  If your kid even brings up the topic of this game, try to divert them.  Make up something, or lie and say the game was taken off the market for lead poisoning.  Whatever you do, avoid this game at all costs!

]]> http://www.coreycharette.com/the-perils-of-skylanders/feed/ 0 http://www.coreycharette.com/fathers-disaster-guide-why-become-a-father/ http://www.coreycharette.com/fathers-disaster-guide-why-become-a-father/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000 Corey Charette http://www.coreycharette.com/?p=641 Before you become a father, you have to ask yourself why do you want to be a father?

I can hear you now saying things like: “I want to carry on the family name.” or “I want someone that I can love unconditionally.”

Well, stop lying to yourself.  We all know the truth as to why you want to be a father.

Sex feels GREAT!

That’s right, I said it.  Whether we plan on having children or an “accident” occurs nothing feels better than rubbing two bodies together is strange twisted positions.

If sex didn’t feel remotely enjoyable at all then the human race would have died off a long time ago and genealogy websites would be much easier to find you family heritage.

So, admit it.  You want to be a parent for all those other reasons, but the core reason, like everything else in a man’s life, is sex.

Hope you enjoy.

~Corey