Waxing Politic

The post office has been messing up big time around here.

Last year, my aunt and uncle sent me a birthday card with a gift card inside. A couple of weeks after my birthday my aunt called to ask what I bought with it. "What gift card?" It never arrived. Either it was delivered to the wrong address, or someone felt the plastic card inside and opened it. She later told me that she had it looked into and the card was used at a Target not far from where I live.

Last weekend our land line phone was turned off. Our next door neighbor came over to tell us that it wasn't working. She tried to call my mom about something and got a recording that the number had been disconnected. When I tried to use the phone, the recording said that our service had been interrupted.

Mom called AT&T to find out what the problem was. Our phone service was turned off due to non payment. She swore that she had mailed the check, the service person said they had not received it.

I looked at the checkbook myself. Mom had made out the check and mailed it. She then called the bank. It had not been cashed. It would have been nice if the phone company would have called us first to let us know about it instead of just shutting off our service. It's been paid by credit card and the phone is working now, but the letter warning us that our service would be interrupted never arrived either.

On Monday, a pink slip was left on our front door informing us that our water bill had not been paid. Our water would be shut off by 5:00 PM Wednesday if it wasn't paid by then. This morning my mom called about that too. She had sent a check in the mail for our water bill. The lady she spoke to told her not to worry about it. The check had arrived the day before. They weren't even going to charge us the late fee because they could see by the date on the envelope from the post office that it had been sent almost two weeks ago. Two weeks to send a letter to an office that I could walk to in 30 minutes. It had been lost in the mail that long.

Today I retrieved the mail from our mail box. I was about to throw away some junk mail when I saw that there was a letter stuck inside of some advertisement flyer. On the front of the letter was printed the words "IMPORTANT: TAX RETURN DOCUMENTS ENCLOSED". This letter was for a Xuan Thi Bui, that's not me or anyone at our house. Not only was it delivered to the wrong address, I almost threw it away because it was stuck inside of junk mail.

So I wrote, "delivered to wrong address" on the envelope and will send it back out tomorrow. I hope this Xuan person gets it in time.

I showed this to my mother and she said, "This is another example of how well government run services operate. If we do ever wind up with socialized medicine, it will eventually get to be just as bad."

My mom doesn't tend to get political. She hardly ever talks about stuff like that. We both believe that improvements can be made in the health care industry, especially when it comes to insurance. Maybe setting laws to make them more fair to the consumer would be better than just taking it over.

She told me about a documentary program she saw about 8 years ago about government waste. At that time the Bureau of Indian Affairs lost over a billion dollars in one year. This was money paid by the taxpayers to go to the welfare of people living on reservations. They had no idea what happened to the money. On the reservations where that money was supposed to go, people were still living without electricity or indoor plumbing.

On another reservation, a business entrepreneur had opened a plastics factory (they made plastic knives, forks and spoons) and had employed the residents of that reservation. The employees were living in houses nicer that the one I live in now.

The reason the people of Boston threw the tea into the harbor was because they were protesting taxation without representation. The problem we have now is taxation without accountability.

Any business that took a billion dollars from investors, lost it, and could only say, "we have no idea where it went" would be thoroughly investigated. You bet someone would go to jail.

When a bureaucracy does it, most of the time you don't even hear about it.

It would be great to live in a country where anyone and everyone could get the medical treatment that they need no matter what kind of job they have or even if they are unemployed. I just think that Washington needs to clean up their act first, or we're going to end up with another mess.




My Group