Word: mailed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Postal officials say it is just a coincidence that postal employees have been involved in such mayhem, but the general public might nonetheless wonder if the mail isn't driving the mailman crazy. Psychologist Mark Haffey, who counseled workers after the Taylor killings in California, warned that "two employees identified strongly with the violence by John Taylor. They indicated that they had experienced similar impulses but had not acted on them...
...pressure is growing from the public as the price of stamps goes up while service goes down, and hotshot new businesses like Federal Express demonstrate that a letter can absolutely, positively get there overnight. The Postal Service has had to automate to move more than 160 billion pieces of mail a year with ever greater efficiency. New machines have reduced handling costs from $15 per thousand letters to $3 per thousand. Despite automation, human hands still touch most letters 14 times. Automation means they just have to do it faster. "The stress is tremendous," says American Postal Workers Union President...
...nightmare of the new automation is the optical character reader, which shoots out 30,000 pieces of mail an hour and shows no mercy. A postal clerk has about a second to read an address and punch in the first three digits of the ZIP code, which is then translated into a bar-code symbol for sorting mail by carrier route. With no way to slow down the machine, the clerk is like Lucille Ball in her comic routine at a candy factory. One moment, Lucy is standing at the conveyor belt blithely wrapping individual candies; the next...
...Security checks and Christmas cards for fudge caramels, imagine 150,000 annual grievance proceedings and 69,000 disciplinary actions instead of firing, and a picture of the modernized Postal Service emerges. Officials downplay the problems but admit that the new pace is hard on older clerks accustomed to stuffing mail into pigeonholes. Yet the old-fashioned postalworker represented by two powerful unions is going to have to adjust. "We've got to capture the savings dollar-for-dollar that these machines represent, or we can kiss the Postal Service as we know it goodbye," says Robert Setrakian, chairman...
Trying to deliver 160 billion pieces of mail may be driving the carrier crazy. Bush's fence-mending mission to China unleashes a storm of criticism. -- AIDS protesters target the Roman Catholic Church...