h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As an installation technician, I recently installed new machines in many postal facilities that can automatically sort mail at about 25-30 thousand letters/hour. They will put each letter into a bin for the postal delivery person with an accuracy of 99.95%. Although these machines cost $300,000 or more, they pay for themselves in 9 months. Our postal system even has some "black operations" that use no operators at all, robots handle the mail in such an efficient manner that it reduces the cost of our postage. Of course there are technicians there to fix the machines, and to perform preventative maintenance, these robots handle the mail from the truck that brings the mail in to the truck that takes the sorted mail away and it works!

With the advent of email (such as this) there is an increasing percentage of commercial mail (junk mail). Which has already caused the price of a first class letter to go up now to $.37. Since there are now package delivery companies that section of the post office is increasing its prices too.

Over all though, the US Postal service delivers over a billion pieces of mail a year for a reasonable price,and on time. It is the rare exception that seems to get noticed. The myth of postal workers going crazy (or "Postal") is no more true that any other organization that has 500,000 people working for it Of course any organization with that many people will have problems, but I will continue to give them the "good job" well done.