The U.S. Post Office At Work

I want to share an experience I just had with the U.S. Post Office.

I'm a Kaiser Permanente patient with a much-too-long list of pills to take, and I happily use Kaiser's web page to order prescription renewals by mail.  I have a spreadsheet that reminds me when something needs renewing and gives me about 2 weeks lead time to order.  I rarely have to wait more than 3-4 days for my prescription to appear in my mailbox.  It's a very convenient system.

On Feb. 3, I reordered a prescription.  On Feb. 11, as I was doing my weekly pill reload, I realized that I was almost out of that pill, and that I hadn't received the refill.  Kaiser's site has a "track your order" link to usps.com, so I clicked on it to see what was going on.  This is what I found.

Sacred Duty

I didn't listen to 45's State of the Union address.  I've heard a couple of quotes from it, though, which disturbed me greatly.  Here's the first one:

All Americans deserve accountability and respect — and that is what we are giving them.  So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers — and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.

 So, he wants his department heads to be able to fire people at will.  This would take us back to the 19th century, before the Federal Civil Service was established in 1871.  At that period any government employee could be fired by the President for any reason, or no reason, at any time; and government employees were chosen for their political allegiance.  The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and subsequent laws slowly changed the system to what we have today, where the majority of the U.S. federal work force is appointed based on merit, that is, qualifications measured by tests.