First, let's review; what is ZIP Numbering?
Zone Improvement Plan ~ ZIP Numbering
as seen on our powermailing pages...
Assign every domestic postal customer a ZIP Number, identifying its physical address, and introduce the US public to its meaning and purpose:
components: a. 23223 is your existing 5-digit code
b. C0250 is your letter carrier, Ex: Mr Jones.
c. A500 is your mailstop on Mr. Jones' route.
d. A is your personal identifier, as:
ending letter A: is your household's Mr. Johnson
ending letter B: is your household's Mrs. Johnson
ending letter C: is the first child, and so forth.
or, for businesses,
ending letters AA: is your employee Mrs. Williams
ending letters AC: is your employee Mr. Phillips
The ending letters are personal identifiers and
they can be any length needed to fully map your
address, a through zzz, for 1 through 25974 persons.
The use of personal identifiers within your household
or business is strictly optional. They are for the
arbitrary use and convenience of the inhabitants, and
their meanings are not known by, and are of no concern
to, the USPS.
Dear Postal Customer:
Your revised ZIP Number is 23223/C025/A500.
You no longer have a ZIP Code; you have fully
self-describing ZIP Number.
Use this ZIP Number for every piece of mail.
If you move, register your old ZIP Number to your
new ZIP Number, so as to inform the USPS that customer
23223/C025/A500A has now moved and is new ZIP Number
23233/C002/B006A.
The USPS will forward your mail from old to new for 36
months, after which your former number will be inactive.
The person who moves into you former dwelling will have
a revised ZIP Number different from you old number.
That person's ZIP Number would be: 23223/C025/B500A.
If that person in turn moves, the third resident's
ZIP Number would become: 23223/C025/C500A
Please feel free to append your suite, apartment, room
or mailstop designator behind this ZIP Number in this way,
if you desire to do so:
23223/C025/A500A STE C
or
23223/C025/A500A RM 1006
This can help your internal mail deliveries within your
business offices.
In this way, postal customers will soon learn that mail can reach them equally well by any of the below addresses:
A. Mrs. Sally Jane Dawson
123 Old Oak Ln.
Logan, MA 02453/C025/A500A
or
B. Mrs. Sally Jane Dawson
Logan, MA 02453/C025/A500A
or
C. Logan, MA 02453/C025/A500A
or
D. 02453/C025/A500A
Any of the above addresses will carry mail to the correct Mrs. Sally Jane Dawson, in Logan, MA.
ZIP® and ZIP+4®, United States Postal Service
The problem is that the Post Office has tunnel vision.
If I were to take Mrs. L. J. Finch, from Omaha, a housewife who's never seen inside a postal facility, much as I saw a network program that took a normal (and pretty) mother of four and made her a Dallas Cowbow's Cheerleader for a short change of pace, and told her, Rule One: don't listen to what the employees here say to you; just manage this plant the way you know it should be managed; and then said,
``Mrs. Finch, you are the postmaster here now. We will check back with you in a few days to see how it's going.''
With the above ruse in place, we have our setup to show how the tunnel vision takes its effect.
On day two, Mrs. Finch unexpectedly learns that three percent of the plant's incoming mail is hauled out the back door as waste paper.
Aghast, she then observes that no one is at all alarmed by this. She inquires, ``What does this amount to, you know, in dollars?''
Mr. Willis, from accounting, scratches some figures on his note pad, and holds up the note to her, with a grin: "Well, let's see, it's 6,000,000,000 pieces annually, at about 20 cents a whack, just for the postage, and that comes to roughly One Billion Two Hundred Million, Mrs. Finch. Of course, you'd have to really add what the mailers paid to produce this mail, in printing, design, assembly and transportation and all, and I guess that could be about another 20 cents, easily; and then you'd have something like Two Point Four Billion, Mrs. Finch.''
Spilling just a few drops of coffee on this morning tour, Mrs. Finch quickly looks for a chair or box to sit upon and compose.
After a few moments of head wagging and blinking, she glances at her watch, and says, ``You know, Bernie, I'm no numbers person such as yourself, but I can tell you that's enough to pay for the complete college education of thousands and thousands of young students, and probably enough to erect two new universities for them to attend.'' Bernie quickly adds, ``Yes. And the sad part is it's been going on for years, all these many years.''
She says, ``What would it take to fix it?'' And Bernie thinks, ''You know, the mailers don't even know this is going on. They think all their mail is being delivered, 100 percent. But what it would take is a system for addressing mail to an absolute delivery number, one that is true and certain. With a system like that, instead of the ZIP+4, and no ZIP+4, and what have you, we'd know exactly where to deliver mail. And the mailers would know exactly how to address it, which they don't now. They're using the same old ways of addressing mail we've had for two hundred years or more; it's just all out of step with the times.''
Write your congressional representatives today!
Get the US Postal Service out of the waste-disposal business, and help save our economy and our planet.
Waste Not, Want Not.
How To Do It.
If just the seven million who've lost their job writes, that will do it.
Mrs. Finch inquires, ``I thought all these fancy barcodes and scanners and sorters were supposed to attend to all that?'' But Mr. Willis sadly informs her, ``No, Mrs, Finch, those things just don't really tie back to anything. They're a hoax, really; a sham.''
``You'd have to get down to a real solid numbering system, something logical, for it to work. Heck, our people don't even know what ZIP+4 is, unless they read it from a manual, and even then it makes no sense,'' he concludes.
``Well I've got to go attend an employees' seminar now, Bernie; but I'm going to be thinking a lot about this tonight, and I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know where we might come up with some remedy for this awful waste. I'll see what you've thought of in the morning. Maybe we can find some source of information on it, you know, maybe on the internet, or from our Washington Headquarters.''
Bernie assures her, ``I'll do some checking, but I can tell you now, don't mention this to Washington. They're solidly behind ZIP+4, and that's the biggest part of our problem. They don't want solutions from the field. They have it all figured out upstairs. But your being new, I guess you could bring it up without harm. They will soon set you straight that they take care of delivery logistics. Our job is to deliver the mail with the many, many tools they've given us.''
Showing her the path to nearest warehouse exit, he assures her, ``But if I see any new theories on it, I'll sure let you know, Mrs Finch. I'd kinda like to see some progress on this thing myself. It's still upsetting to me to see all this waste, day in and day out.
She smiles in her practiced motherly way, and says, ``Good day, Bernie; you've been more help to me than you know.''
Tax Cuts or Waste Cuts? Taxes pay for critical services, homeland security, foreign war, and our accumulated debt; and they are the foundation of progress and the burden of a developed and progressive people until we have met our challenges. Don't put this debt off onto the hopes of our future. Act now to cut waste, make jobs, and get this government's nose out of the debates of meeting rooms and into the heart of the America, where we all live and prosper. We do not need to be told how to do our jobs when we have them to do. No excuses; domestic success should not be an option, nor a gamble; it's our responsibility. If it's best for America, then let's do it by working together!
The reform system I've suggested calls for, among other things, a complete re-writing of the Domestic Mail Manual, transforming it into a fifteen-page pamphlet. This will raise the ire of many who have helped to compose this work's thousands of pages. To alleviate that stress, after the example of my brother Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, who drafted our Declaration of Independence over a weekend, a document that has served us well for over two hundred years, I volunteer to write this new booklet, over a weekend, for our completion and refinement in a co-operative assessment that can follow. As our first Postmaster General, and the editor of Jefferson's ``hold theses truths'' phrase, having it read, ``...to be self-evident,'' I'm sure Ben Franklin would do the same, were he still around.
It is hoped the inspiration of above example will lead a more practiced writer to take up the challenge of the US Tax Code, an intrinsically simpler subject matter, but more contentious nature. We will leave it to the reader's surprise if that edition can be concluded within from five- to twenty pages, depending entirely, of course, on the author's chosen ``complexity'' and penchant for in-line example, given by long prose. The thought of this could become alarming to several hundreds of thousands of contemporary tax practitioners of the accountancy and law professions. Withal we can surmise it could be addressed by less length than the entire US Constitution from which is derives.
It could then be regarded as the new US Tax Rule, absent exception, avoiding any of those mysteries the ``code'' denomination infers.
Copyright © 2003 mail-production.com® created 2000 -- last modified 2003-06-01