Yesterday, I sent some mail that was long overdue. How overdue was it? One of the two envelopes I mailed contained correspondence I had first attempted to fax in early May.

The documentation in question was an authorization for me to inquire about and negotiate (read: fight) medical bills on behalf of my spouse. The need for this arose from the fact that such bills must be fought during daytime hours, when I am often separated from my spouse and she is thus not available to get on the phone and orally authorize me to speak on her behalf. One bill in particular, for $211, should have been $40, and the ongoing fights and discussions were becoming completely debilitating, no less because the provider refused to reissue the bill for $40 despite our insurance company confidently assuring me that they would. I could make these fights more of an urgent priority to knock out immediately, but there’s something to be said to responding to the urgent “due immediately” nature of such paperwork with an unhurried and methodical pace that refuses to play ball. Plus, I’m busy most daytime hours, with the job that gives me the opportunity to get insurance whose bills need persistent fighting.

(Note: I’m not complaining about the job. I am complaining about our system of insurance, it being tied to jobs, and the fact that insurance increasingly provides so very little, even compared to what it did in California 20 years ago.)

The fact that the only acceptable ways to authorize me to permanently and continually fight medical bills on behalf of my spouse, which then get paid with a shared credit card are: (a) fax or (b) US mail is perplexing in an era of instant scans, photos of documentation, and binding authorized electronic signatures. It is a fascinating relic of the fax era that, despite operating like a photocopier, faxed documents still carry the cache of legitimacy with some entities that digital artifacts do not, despite the superior quality, readability, durability, and verifiability of the latter. So I tackled my work fax that’s allegedly built in to the all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax machines in my office. After six failed attempts, I gave up. Either there’s a trick to it that no one knows, it isn’t actually hooked up, or the other phone wasn’t set up as a fax machine.

Then the paperwork kicked around in my backpack for six weeks. I honestly forgot about it for a few weeks, then we got another $211 bill and I got irrationally angry all over again and called my insurance company to say their fax number didn’t work, and they said they would note it but I could send it in the mail. I resolved to do it and then forgot about it. And on this went for a while. And then June 30 happened. So that was July.

In some ways, this makes actually getting the darn two-page document, signed and dated by Alex, in the mail a monumental feat. There’s a familiar way that facing trivial but annoying tasks can start to feel insurmountably exhausting, and they take a life of their own in one’s mental-emotional ecosystem the longer they go undone. This is a well-documented product of contemporary existence in over-technified societies, where our distractions are so legion and our guilt so developed that the small things become totems of despair-inducing failure. And when they’re finally done, it’s hard to even celebrate them because we just feel so much shame at how easy and simple they were in the first place.

Given all this, it’s funny to reflect on the fact that mailing it in is an idiom for not trying. The etymology, of course, is not bothering to show up and instead sending one’s work by a relatively slow means of communication. But there are more insidious implications to this connotation, I would contend: everything we associate with the US mail in our daily nomenclature is negative. Driven to the edge of murder by stress? You’re going postal. Using the mail in general? It’s snail mail. The postal service is possibly our most maligned government agency, and we have at least five separate systems dedicated to killing people (four international, one domestic, broadly speaking) and another devoted to collecting their money. It is continually criticized for failing to turn a profit, despite the fact that said profit would consist entirely of making it vastly more expensive for people to use its services.

And its services are, make no mistake, excellent. The postal service is arguably the greatest manifestation of the American system, alongside fellow contenders public libraries and national parks. The notion that for less than a dollar, you can send any written communique – be it letter, card, official notice, or invitation – anywhere in the country in a couple days is incredible. It’s one of those things that if it didn’t happen to exist, everyone would call a pipe dream to suggest. What do you mean everyone’s house will be visited almost every day for the sole purpose of sharing information and correspondence with them? What kind of utopia are you imagining?

And no doubt this is part of what’s motivating a lot of naysayers of government everything to deliberately try to frame the debate around the mail in terms of profit (when was the last time the police were asked to turn a profit?) and trump up the occasional story of lost or stolen mail as proof that the system is antiquated and worthless. It’s the same playbook currently being deployed with public libraries, public schools, public universities, and public transit. These public enemies are convinced that everything should be privatized, presumably so we can all spend much more of our time sending documentation that gives us the right to fight incorrect aggressive bills on behalf of our family members.

But in 2023, some of these institutions still stand. And my beloved post office, a place that I long wanted to work (along with farmer and hotel night manager, postal mail sorter [not carrier] was a job I idealized in my youth), has square footage in my favorite cathedral of transportation: the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. Not only was this office most convenient for my daily life, as 30th Street is my daily commute terminus, being a few blocks from Drexel, but it afforded the opportunity that my mail would be stamped with a notation as being sent from 30th Street, thus conveying fond associations to any who have memories of sitting or standing and marveling in the grand columned concourse and waiting for a train.

Perhaps they don’t have such a stamp and this is all being exaggerated in my head. And who at the insurance office would have time or inclination to look at such a stamp on an envelope anyway? The days where we even notice what stamps show up on all but the fanciest mail are well behind us, as the physical mail no doubt will be before too long. Maybe the conversation about this service will have to be had with Graham, or possibly Graham’s child (if applicable), and they will present the same wonder that someone imagining an uninvented postal service would display. “How could that possibly have been? And why? Didn’t they have phones? Didn’t they have email? Didn’t they have the little chips in their head that auto-ported information across the planet in seconds like we do now?”

“It was a simpler time,” I might intone in that future. But maybe, thinking about how I envision the Pony Express, or telegrams, it was a more complicated time. Maybe it was just different. Or maybe we’re continually inventing new systems in the vain hope that it will somehow make it just a little easier to do what we all most crave: connect with each other.

This is the 14th post in the One Thing series.

Last Five
#13: Get Organized
#12: That Escalated Quickly
#11: Pulling Hen’s Teeth
#10: Do the Extra Thing
#9: Climbing the Ladder

Introduction & First Four
#4: Forgive, Don’t Forget
#3: Call Your Mother
#2: In the Land of Make-Believe
#1: Wistful Wisteria
Introduction: Announcement and Rules