Going Postal

I found an expensive little stink-bomb in the post office box I rent from one of Saipan’s private postal companies: A stack of change-of-address forms. I’m supposed to fill them out and send them to everyone in the world who might ever want to mail me something.

I don’t know why the address is being changed, but it’s an expensive proposition. I’ll need new letterhead, new envelopes, new business cards, and I’ll need to change a lot of the standard title pages and such that I put into professional reports.

What’s more, the costs to rent my private P.O. box have climbed 33 percent over the past couple of years.

The problem, of course, is that our main U.S. post office at Chalan Kanoa has a shortage of post office boxes, so many of us have to depend on private companies to fill that niche.

It’s fashionable in the mainland to malign the U.S. Postal Service at every turn, but I’ve always thought it does a fine job. Thirty-three cents to mail a letter from coast to coast, or, of course, all the way from Saipan to the mainland sounds like a bargain to me.

One of my readers, Maria, told me she hurried to the CK post office, bought a book of stamps, and then in her haste to return to work left the stamps on the post office counter. An alert postal clerk noted the problem and tucked the stamps away. Maria telephoned from work a couple of hours later when she realized the problem, and got her stamps from the clerk the following day.

When you consider that you could starve to death in most Saipan restaurants before some gum- chewing space cadet of a waitress would ever consider taking your order, you have to give the CK post office credit for having some kind of aptitude for customer service. They’ve always been courteous and helpful whenever I dealt with them. If I had to stand behind a counter and answer the same dumb questions every day for eight hours, I’d start frothing at the mouth and attacking customers, maybe even using the dreaded Flying Cambodian Chop, of which I am a tenth-degree master.

Back to the address change: When I consider the costs of stationary re-printing and the cost I’m paying for the post office box rental, we’re looking at roughly $300 for the year. I’m happy to pay that much for Internet service, since via the World Wide Web I can see pictures of Madeline Albright in her latex thong bikini.
Ohhhh, la la. But three bills a year just for a few cubic inches of space with a number on it? I’m having some doubts about that.

Of course, we’re lucky to have the private postal box providers here, since without them a lot of us couldn’t get mail at all. They fill a niche created by the lack of boxes at CK. If the new CK post office has an abundance of P.O. boxes, though, it will have a profound impact on the private postal box sector.