David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published June 29, 2004

37 cents is quite a bargain

A friend's a friend, but there are limits to favors, even among pals. I'll drive a friend to the airport. I'll pick up a friend's mail for a week while he's at the beach. I'll even sometimes pick up the tab for an entire table if the mood strikes me.

That being said, there's no way I'd ever deliver a friend's credit card payment all the way to Minneapolis. A friend's a friend, but that's about 1,900 miles round trip. It's not like I can just drop it off when I go by there. Even if I DID find myself in Minneapolis one day, I still wouldn't deliver the payment as a favor. I don't know my way around Minneapolis. It would take me all afternoon just to find the right building, to speak nothing of finding the right office.

As favors go, that's simply too much to ask.

However, I know someone who will be glad to do it - no sweat. He'll be happy to take care of it. He does it all the time. Just plunk down a quarter, a dime and two lousy pennies, and your payment will find its way to the right city, the right building and the right office, just like that.

He's the mailman. Well, I suppose in these days of political correctness and gender equity, I should say postal carrier, not mailman, but you get the idea. While I'm at it, I'll call that thing in the street a personhole cover.

When you consider the topnotch service you get from a measly 37-cent postal stamp, you must agree that mail delivery is one of the best bargains on the planet. That 37 cents will take your documents thousands of miles. A piece of paper that's in my hand right will be in someone else's hands in a few days, and it won't be a digitally reproduced copy. It'll be the real deal, the actual piece of paper. It's not a fax or an email, which merely send the document's image via phone lines. Mail gives you THE paper.

Before I continue, I'd like to say that I'm not a shill for the postal service. I've had problems with mail service just like everyone else. I get my neighbor's mail at least once a month, and one a letter I sent took 12 days to go from west Knoxville to downtown Knoxville. And I once received a package that looked, and I'm not making this up, as though it had been run over by a truck. Somehow the contents were intact, despite of the shabby treatment it received.

Even with this water under the bridge (or package under the tire, as the case may be), I still believe a reliable postal service is one of the cornerstones of a truly civilized society. Mail gives us a sense of continuity, a sense that no matter what happens in our lives, we'll get a little surprise in our mailboxes six days a week. For the most part, the postal service is rock solid.

We depend on the mail We trust the mail. That's why it' so distressing when we don't get mail. You've had this happen, right? Every so often you just don't get any mail that day. You open the mailbox and nothing's there -- no bills, no magazines, no out-of-town newspapers, nothing. You check your neighbors' mailbox flags to see if the postal carrier has made the rounds yet. All the flags are down, the mail has come, and you chalked up a big zilch. Crestfallen, you shuffle back to the house with a nagging sense that no one cares.

It kind of throws you off for the rest of the day, doesn't it? I mean, even if you get nothing but junk, at least you got something. I'd prefer a mailbox full of credit card offers, catalogs I didn't ask for and politicians' pleas for cash and votes (aren't they the same?) rather than nothing. When the mailbox is empty, I feel as though something's gone horribly, horribly wrong. Even if it's junk mail, I still miss it.

"Neither rain, nor hail, nor sleet, nor snow, nor gloom of night will stay these couriers from their appointed rounds." Now where else are you going to get a deal like that for 37 cents? Not even the pizza guy can touch that. If it's raining, hailing, sleeting in the midst of a gloomy evening, you'd better come up with a better tip than 37 cents.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.