As the death march of the United States Postal Service continues, Evan Kalish of Going Postal blog is doing his best to visit and document the post offices that are slated to be closed. So far, he's visited 2,745 post offices in 43 states.

This one above is in Junedale, Pennsylvania, and sadly it has a common tale:

The town is just south of Hazleton, which itself is near the intersection of Interstates 80 and 81 in northeast PA. This was a meaningful visit for me; there was a local resident in the office who detailed to me the story of the beautiful landscaping in front of the post office.

Three years ago this post office looked very different. A local Boy Scout earned his Eagle Award for providing community service. What did he do? He fixed up the front of the post office and made it beautiful.

First up: You see the trees and roses out front? This Eagle Scout planted them. The rock gardens? Also his work. If you look closely, you can see a bench right below the sign between the trees. Guess who built it! Yep, he did. He donated the new Junedale Post Office sign as well. Isn't it fantastic?

By my understanding, the final item was to extend the flag pole. Literally, he made it taller. Why? The Postmaster told me that it's because the flag used to drag on the roof of the post office. Now it waves without interference. (It wasn't windy when I arrived there, so we couldn't really see it in action; but we can see how it clears the roof, right?)

This is one anecdote that demonstrates the social importance of the post office to small communities such as Junedale across the country. Even though it's the only business in town, residents sure take pride in it. Outside the post office, when I was taking these photos, I told a resident "I hope you can keep this office open." Her response: "We do, too."

Rural communities across America are experiencing the indignity of being exposed to boilerplate 'public meetings' wherein they're basically informed that the decision has been made to close their post office. According to a resident I asked outside this post office, the public meeting felt canned and the residents felt the decision had already been made to close their office. This story was repeated to me in small towns all across Pennsylvania this weekend. Every single time I asked, I got back the exact same response.

Closing a local post office, especially in rural towns, can have repercussions far beyond just having to drive a bit further to another facility to send your mail - these post offices are often the heart of the community, sort of a de facto town center where people connect with each other.

The sad part? Even closing all of the local post offices aren't going to come close to solving the financial woes of the USPS. Josh Sanburn of TIME Magazine explains:

"Closing post offices has almost nothing to do with the financial problem that the postal service finds itself in today," says Hutkins, founder of savethepostoffice.com. "Virtually nothing. The cost of operating these post offices and the amount of money that will be saved by closing them is minuscule in the context of the budget of the postal service and the deficit that it's running." [...]

By the USPS's calculations, closing all the 3,650 post offices up for review would save just $200 million, or 2% of the deficit of about $10 billion. But it would also eliminate thousands of jobs. "This is a problem I really struggle with because it seems so irrational," Hutkins says.

Links: Going Postal blog and How the U.S. Postal Service Fell Apart over at TIME

Previously on Neatorama: USPS Rescue Plan: More Junk Mail! | US Postal Service: Is Collapse Imminent?

Neither snow nor rain nor bad handwriting will stop the post office from delivering mail. But how exactly does the postal service deal with bad handwriting?

With humans. Lots of them.

Barry Newman of the Wall Street Journal tell us what happened to the letters whose addresses are deemed indecipherable by the post office's automated sorting machines:

Computers have since learned to see words in scrawls and squiggles the way voice-recognition software hears them in hemming and hawing. The Postal Service says their reading score today is 95%.

What's left over is the handwriting from hell. It pours into just two remaining RECs—here and in Wichita, Kan. Their 1,900 clerks cope with machine-unreadable mail from the whole country. Last year, that included 714,085,866 chicken-scratch first-class letters.

In late afternoon, when volume peaks at the Salt Lake center, a blinking panel showed 67,000 letters awaiting attention—from San Juan, Paducah, Los Angeles, Kokomo. A clerk wearing a headset had hit a patch of pen-pal letters from pupils in Memphis. She was decrypting them at a rate of 800 per hour, down from the desired 1,100.

"We ought to teach kids how to address letters," said Bruce Rhoades, a manager looking over her shoulder. His boss, Karen Heath, stood watching beside him and sighed, "A lost art."

Link (Photo: Barry Newman/The Wall Street Journal)

Photos from the Postal Inspector’s office show someone stuffed Stamps into a makeshift cage, doped him up on Benedryl, and tried to mail the ferret to the U.S. Territory.

The Postal Inspector handling the case, David McKinney, believes whoever tried to mail Stamps knew they were up to no good. The return address on the package is an abandoned house, and the sender doesn’t exist.

A local family with 15 other ferrets has adopted Stamps, who is healthy and estimated to be about two years old. Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: US Postal Inspector)

“They said ‘This is a federal building and he doesn’t pay federal taxes so he can’t come in’,” said postal worker Rochelle Langford.

From the pose he strikes in this photo, Sammy doesn’t seem too happy about the eviction. But Sammy’s supporters think they have found a way around the banishment. They have rented a post office box in his name! Link -via Arbroath