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by lloydatkinson 29 days ago
I've been told that it was once common in the UK to be able to send an early morning letter and have a reply in your letter box by afternoon. Now, I have Post Office workers graffitiing envelopes and changing the type of postage I just paid for once I've left the Post Office, letters going missing regularly, a couple of stamps costs £10, and first class can take a week. It's now got so bad that we hand delivered cards over Christmas.

Absolutely pitiful.

1 comments

There's nothing surprising about that. Human experience transferred through the ages has been lost to automation and profit-seeking via workforce-reduction. The machine/algorithm may have 80% of the human expertise of railway/post operators, but it's lost the last 20% that made operations seamless.

And it's certainly made work more tedious and painful, which does not exactly lead to better outcomes in the long run. I would certainly recommend reading « La mécanique des lettres » on this topic, but unfortunately i can't find an english translation.

Huh? You can send an email and receive a response within a minute. You can call someone and literally have a live conversation with them.

Yes, we've lost the ability to quickly send pieces of paper to arbitrary homes, but there really isn't a need for it when you have better alternatives.