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“We’ve got a command center here,” says Deputy Postmaster General Ron Stroman, who is based near L’Enfant Plaza. On the telephone, Stroman is extolling the preparedness of the post office in December. In anticipation of the holidays, “We’ve got monitors in a room that monitors . . . stuff around the country.” They’ve got flatscreens to track the volume of the mail. It’s really an impressive and hi-tech operation, Stroman says — the coordination of the 16.5 billion pieces of mail that are moved by 574,000 employees between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. He invites a reporter to come by and see it all.
See the way the Postal Service headquarters looks like the bridge on the Starship Enterprise? No, thank you. Where’s the romance in that?
Still, let’s arrange a backstage pass to another postal experience — the Curseen-Morris Mail Processing and Distribution Center in Northeast Washington. It’s 450,000 square feet of conveyor belts and forklifts, in which 825 people sort the mail of Washington. At 10 p.m., nine days before Christmas, the facility is operating at maximum capacity. Some 36,000 pieces of mail are moved through each hour, accompanied by a dry, electronic hum.
It’s efficient — a workable blend of high-tech and archaic — and it’s impressive, and it feels like a place of diligence. What it doesn’t feel like is festive, or even particularly warm. It’s a business, not the fuzzy idealized image that postal crusaders want to protect.
“People are very much attached to the Postal Service,” Stroman says on the phone. This is why, he explains, one of the post office’s obstacles in adapting to the 21st century is the nostalgia people have for its history. “It’s one of the things we wrestle with on almost a daily basis.”
This month, the Postal Service’s attorneys submitted a somewhat exasperated report to the Postal Regulatory Commission, an independent regulatory agency. The founding legislation of the post office “does not require that long-standing products, service features, and operational practices be maintained primarily for the purpose of preserving a tangible link to an iconic past,” the report said. “Or to perpetuate a nostalgic image of the agency or its employees.”
Stroman wants to expand the Postal Service’s digital offerings and move away from the idea of post offices as brick-and-mortar buildings, but the post office is forever imprisoned by its own wistful reputation.
Let it go. Move on. Buy your stamps at Wal-Mart, send your Christmas letter via e-mail, stop hanging on to the America that doesn’t exist. We have to look forward, we must save the trees. We must recognize that “Post Office at Christmas” would be a good name for a made-for-Hallmark holiday movie, but not a reality show.
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And yet our collective imagination still clings to the Zip code. Who wouldn’t feel sentimental about an institution that still enlists pack mules to deliver mail to the Havasupai Indians living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon?
It’s the holidays, and nostalgia is one of the main ingredients of the holidays: the packing tape, the handwritten cards and the repeated viewings of “Miracle on 34th Street,” in which the existence of Santa Claus is proved by the vast number of letters to Santa that are delivered to the likely insane man claiming to be Kris Kringle at the New York County Court House.
At a pivotal moment in the movie, sacks of mail for the jolly old man are shaken out onto the judge’s bench, postmarked piles of official evidence.
Staff writer Ed O’Keefe contributed to this report.
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