Published: December 30, 2006 08:36 pm         

Stephanie Salter: A guide for 2007: What would USPS do?

TERRE HAUTE — On the last day of the year, some of us look back for lessons and ahead for inspiration. I have found both in a mangled card that showed up in my home mailbox the week before Christmas.

The card was mailed in Terre Haute by friends who, like me, live in the north end. In other words, it didn’t have far to go.

But the card’s journey was not routine. Somewhere along the way it met a terrible fate. (As they say, most accidents happen close to home.) My guess is, a machine that scans and sorts mail ate my friends’ card. Then the machine spit it out in pieces, or a human being had to pull it out.

The card is — was — a nostalgic painting of a snow-covered village scene with a horse-drawn sleigh, a stone church, a rustic bridge over a river and two tykes fashioning a snow man. It resembles a Thomas Kincade painting, but the artist is Nicky Boehme, and it was created for the National Wildlife Federation.

The condition of the card could not be more of a contrast to the perfect, peaceful fantasy of the village scene. All but a tiny corner of its entire top is ripped off. There are jagged tears in a snow-covered cottage next to the river as well as in the pink clouds of a sunset.

Two houses near the church sport wounds that seem to have been made with a screw driver. Not even a steamroller could flatten out the card’s many wrinkles.

When I first saw the mess — displayed in a 6-by-10-inch, big-windowed U.S. Postal Service envelope — I was appalled. I felt sorry for my friends, who put considerable thought and time into everything they send, and I was ticked off that I couldn’t hang their card with all the others around my fireplace.

“What am I supposed to do with this now?” I grumbled, and turned over the USPS envelope to see a long, printed message.

“DEAR VALUED POSTAL CUSTOMER,” it began. “I want to extend my sincere apology as your Postmaster for the enclosed document that was inadvertently damaged in handling by your Postal Service. We are aware of how important your mail is to you. With that in mind, we are forwarding it to you in an expeditious fashion.”

The message went on, describing how the U.S. Postal Service handles more than 202 billion pieces of mail each year, how every employee “makes a concerted effort” to process the pieces safely but how “an occasional mishap does happen.”

The postmaster’s message said the service was working to eliminate such incidents and advised me to keep properly preparing and addressing anything I might “enter into the mailstream.” The postmaster also asked for my understanding and, again, sincerely apologized.

I did a 180.

Suddenly, the United States Postal Service was not an object for my scorn. It was my hero, my role model, my symbol for better behavior in the coming year.

“Who in these times,” I asked myself, “owns a mistake, holds it out in front of you to see and then sincerely apologizes?”

When most individuals, institutions and businesses screw up, they instinctively try to sweep the mess out of sight. If they can’t hide it, they blame it on somebody else (often the U.S. Postal Service) or they somehow manage to make you feel as though the screw-up was your fault for ever asking anything of them in the first place.

I thought of all the other ways the Terre Haute postmaster — or the unnamed postal clerk on whose watch the card mishap had occurred — could have responded to the accident. With no trouble I pictured a harried USPS worker swearing a blue streak, wrenching open a machine then deep-sixing my friends’ maimed card in the nearest trash bin.

Who would know? It isn’t as though my friends would call and say, “Did you get our card?”, or I’d call them and say, “Why didn’t you guys send me a Christmas card this year?”

The mishap could be like the tree that falls in an uninhabited forest. No sound, no foul. On the off-chance the subject did come up, my friends would say they sent me a card, I would say I didn’t get it, and we would all make disparaging remarks about that faceless, monolithic bureaucracy, “the post office.”

We would say things like, “They’re always losing mail” or “You can’t trust them to get anything where it’s supposed to go,” which are lies, but people repeat them all the time.

A letter or bill doesn’t arrive by the minimum estimated time and we condemn the whole system. We forget about every package or envelope we drop into the mailstream that makes it to its destination on time and undamaged. We pay no attention to the reality of 202 billion moving parts per year.

Oh, I know. There’s plenty wrong with the U.S. Postal Service. It’s a weird quasi-public entity with too many under-used buildings and thousands of employees with pensions. All the smart folks say complete privatization is the only cure.

Maybe it is (though I have my doubts). Until Congress decides the service’s fate, however, I plan to put my mangled Christmas card in a place where I can see it each day. When I am tempted to alibi or make excuses, to distract from my own culpability or shift the blame, I will look at the ripped and hacked-up village scene through the window of the 6-by-10 USPS envelope, and I will remind myself:

The post office owns its boo-boos; I must own mine.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.