Postal Scandemonium - Will Scanning Overkill Bite Us In The Butt?

By Mel Carriere

Our competitors love to shame the Postal Service for alleged poor scanning, writing us off as bumbling boobs - overpaid, under-worked, unmotivated, bla bla bla government sponges, lounging around on the public dole. In reality, Postal scanning is not the simple proposition it is for our delivery counterparts in the private sector. Yes, incompetence is part of the scandemonium we encounter in the Postal workplace, but not on the level an outsider, looking in, might think. The real catalyst of scanning snafus is the Postal Service's unique situation of being a dumping ground for all packages, big and small, from all over the planet.

No matter where you ship on this big blue marble, postal competitors FedEx and UPS - to cite the two Great Danes but keeping our dog spray ready for the lesser delivery lap dogs too - have a neat, standardized bar code on all packages, the same one no matter their place of origin. The other big dog on the block, Amazon, generates its parcels from its own network of warehouses, so it is slapping its own clean, sexy little label on every box that goes out the door.

On the other hand, the Postal service receives shipments from every obscure, backwater post office on the planet, each nursing along its own stone-age bar code technology. Take for instance those tiny SPRs, arriving by the hundreds in big plastic bags, each little chunk's address written in microscopic script that Ant Man can't read. The bar codes from the Philippines are different from those from China, Indonesia, Great Britain, etc, the list being as long as the United Nations roster.

Admittedly, writing a scanning percentage program to accommodate all of these displaced orphans would not be an easy proposition for the most highly skilled programmers, and I think we can all agree that postal software developers are not always the best and the brightest. Furthermore, from my experience, the USPS does not invest heavily in beta testing. They don't send out scores of system development people onto the bomb cratered front lines, to observe job processes and talk to employees to see how the work gets done, in real world conditions (Think FSS). No, they throw things together on the fly based on wishful thinking assumptions, then expect reality to bend to the ideal. After that,the next few years are spent stomping out bugs scurrying across the workroom floor, when with a little forethought the cracks in the baseboard could have been patched early on. By the time they do manage to plug the holes in the boat, the clumsy scow is now obsolete, and it's on to the next technological fiasco.

Unfortunately, my particular post office is one of those "vital few" in scanning percentage, as defined by the dictates of this awkward program that is not sure what it is measuring. The term "vital few" actually sounds kind of groovy, like you're an elite bunch indispensable to the continuation of the free world - Fantastic Four, Fox Force Five, Vital Few. But in the world of postal euphemisms the nicer something sounds, the worse it is. If I go home tonight and tell my non postal wife  hey honey we made the vital few, perhaps she, in her blessed and blissful ignorance of all things postal, might be impressed. Yet anyone who humps mail for drinking money knows this is not a good list to be on. They can't get away with saying shirt list, however, so they put an ambiguously non threatening title on it, like vital few. 

In an effort to increase our piss poor performance, our vital few office now has had two extra burdens shoved into our saddlebags. These came down not so much with realistic expectations they will improve scanning, but for punishment. 

The first of these twin pillars of postal penance is to scan load feature for every package. I'm not talking shoe box size and above, but every package, from that fifty pound box of brake shoes you lug up two flights of stairs to that feather light SPR that blows away if you sneeze. All creatures great and small. The rationale given for this - because sadists have to invent a reason why the pain they inflict upon you is for your own good, is so the parcels will show up in the look ahead feature. But guess what, I checked and if packages pass through the PASS machine they are already in parcel look ahead. You don't have to load scan them to get your kiss on my list. This fallacy now being debunked, the only remaining reason is punishment, like I said.

The other side of the loaded punishment coin that flips tails every time, because it kicks you in the tail, is that we have to scan every single package on the street too. Again all creatures great and small. Those wafer thin packages from the Pacific Rim that cost a buck twenty five to mail and have clearly bogus bar codes that clearly say DO NOT SCAN - we have to scan them. Just in case, because the postal parcel percentage program is a mystery that even its creators cannot figure out, and nobody has the skill or the will to fix it.

Our office continues to muddle along with this exercise in futility, but I don't think we're out of scanning jail yet, because nobody has paroled us from these twin handcuffs. Meanwhile load times go up because of the extra load feature activity, but scanning overkill will continue until some whiz kid upstairs sees our load time numbers in red ink, and it becomes the flavor of the month again.

Our little office is probably not unique, I am pretty sure this is happening in a lot of places across the country.  And the only people happy about the widespread bar code bonanza are certain Asian entrepreneurs, who are getting their packages tracked for free. Certainly the word has already spread, from Ho Chi Min to Hong Kong, that you can slap any type of bar code on a package and some flunky across the wide Pacific moat will scan it, no charge. Why pay for tracking at all? These Asian mailers laugh sadistically as thousands of letter carriers struggle to aim their scanners at tiny barcodes, then watch the scanner say "Whoa, what the fu-, is this international?¨ while millions of dollars in lost scanning revenue pour into the ocean. There this giant fatberg of misspent funds adds to the growing mass of the Great Pacific Garbage Island, creating an inescapable whirlpool where technologically inept companies spin down the drain.

But how can you plug a hole if you can't find it? Sticking your finger in the dike might be a good stop gap measure, but there are no visible cracks in the dam to plug our digits into. What we've got here is a serious slab leak folks, one that requires digging up the whole porous foundation and starting over. Can our good old multi purpose MDD scanners save us? I think they are useless as flotation devices, but least they have GPS, so the Coast Guard can find us when the whole shoddy mess drifts out to sea.

Photo by Mel Carriere