Not so swift

Many know of (or might recognize) the motto of the postal service:

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

As a Californian (how long must I live here to say that?), I've been aware of some missing attributes; fire, flood, earthquake and more recently power outage. More importantly I've been aware of some serious shortcomings in regard to swiftness. Lisa Friedman of the Daily News takes on the subject today [via LA Observed]:

The internal report for May 4 obtained by Waxman showed at least 78,000 pieces of first-class mail were delayed at the Los Angeles plant on May 4, 2006. The plant had estimated only 1,000 pieces of mail would be delayed.

That underestimation resulted in delays of up to six days, though it is unclear what percentage of mail was delayed that long.

Similarly, periodicals were delayed 10 days.

Periodical delivery is abysmal. I'm not about to blame the South Los Angeles processing center for my problems, I think the whole region is broken.

I subscribed to a technical journal published in Westlake Village for many years. I can hop in the car and be at their offices under all but the worst conditions in less than ten minutes. I'd don't believe they actually do the print run here, but as I recall it's somewhere in SoCal. Routinely, I was the last one to see the latest edition. At one point it got bad enough that people from Europe were remarking about articles in the most recent version before I saw it. That always bugged me.

More recently, I've been getting Sports Illustrated (I got signed up somehow, it does make good rest room reading material until the day when bathrooms come with built in browsers). At best it gets here on Friday (four days), often enough to notice, it shows up the next week. That pre-event feature piece is pretty much useless when it shows up after the event is already over.

As far as I'm concerned those bathroom browsers can't get here fast enough.