I checked my mail

I HAVE conducted a survey.

It was easy because it only involved me; but if it had involved the entire country I’m sure the results would have been the same.

I checked my mail. Every day. And I catalogued it. In a month there have been five bills and 56 unsolicited offers to part me from my money. One of them, incidentally, wanted to help me with erection problems, which only shows what a waste of time they were.

I got one letter. From Readers Digest, but maybe that counts as an unsolicited offer.

I checked my postbox every weekday for a month and there was absolutely no point!

My life is not richer for it. In fact it would have been richer if I hadn’t looked because I wouldn’t have opened — or paid — any of the bills.

The point is: why in the name of commonsense do we still have a daily postal service?

I have a phone, I have a computer with email, I have a car.

If people want me they can use the phone or the email. If I want them I can use those things, too, and the car, if I need to.

Almost the entire population has some combination of these communications tools; and if they don’t then a daily mail service is probably no use to them anyway – unless they want to check out the special offers on phones, computers or cars.

Or erections.

Australia Post, bless ’em, is a waste of time.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Australia Post. Some of the nicest people in the world of customer service work on the other side of an Australia Post counter.

Where else can you ask for sticky tape, or the use of a stapler, and receive not only the service, but the smile, too?

I tried it in the bank and I’m sure she started locking the cash drawer.

But unless you want a furry toy, or a clock that looks like a teapot, or a desk tidy with room for 146 different office items, Australia Post is an anachronism.

Not the counter. Going there and doing business is a delight if only for the chance to browse through countless thousand Steve Parrish postcards

But postboxes?

As obsolete as the Ark. More obsolete, because I’ll bet a pound to a postage stamp that Noah didn’t have one. The only messages he got were from God!

Here’s my proposal: we stop delivering letters!

And if that thought is too radical then let’s consider delivering them only one day a week. Better still, let’s dump deliveries altogether and have people go to the post office to collect their mail.

What could possibly be so urgent in this electronic age that you couldn’t wait a week for it to come by snail mail, or get it sent electronically instead.

The bills?

An erection? If it was that urgent then the last thing on your mind is going to be reading the mail.

And in 2005 who’s going to write a letter unless it’s punched out as an email or as a text message on a mobile phone?

Only lawyers. And — like bills — a letter from a lawyer is not something you’re going to be in a rush to open.

Mark my words, the days of postmen are numbered. Postwomen, too, unless you have a pretty one, in which case the erection material is in the white envelope with the words: “one in five men suffer from it” on the front.