Mysore...
I spent a fascinating few hours (four, as I recall) following one of the 'holy cows' on her morning rounds in Mysore, a medium-sized city south of Bangalore. She was a pretty thing, clean, mostly white with some red. I first saw her as she was being milked by a young woman who was equipped with a 3-leg stool and a red plastic bucket. The cow and the woman were friends.
So I watched from a position maybe 50 feet from the milking scene, doing my best to blend in with the chaos of the alley... the dogs in such places don't like strangers, so it wasn't easy to just hang out. But soon I was wandering behind my new cow friend, curious as to why she made the choices she made... and I wondered, again and again, whether this was a regular route or if she liked some variety in her wanderings. Anyway, after 45 minutes of what seemed like deliberate choices she ended up in the cemetary of the huge stone Presbyterian Church in the south-central part of Mysore, grazing happily among the tombstones of long-forgotten English soldiers and colonists. After following her for almost two hours, my conclusion was that she had several such 'pastures' available to her, and that she had a very good life. I assume she went home after eating her fill among the stones in the churchyard.
So a few days ago I followed another 'sacred cow' for an hour or so. Yes, it was here in Corvallis. This 'cow' was a United States Postal Service vehicle, one of those squarish white gas-powered things the mail deliverers spend their days in. The woman doing the work was youngish, maybe 30, wearing shorts despite the chill of the morning. Her routine was consistent: start the vehicle, pull up maybe 100 feet, shut the engine off, sort some mail, hop out, put the mail into the box by the front door, walk across the yard to the next house, mail into that box, back to the vehicle, repeat. And repeat again. And again. After two streets like this, she came to Elder (our street, in a sense), where her life was simplified... we have mailboxes at the curb. So she kept the engine going and just went box to box, down Elder, across to Hazel, U-turn at the top of Hazel, back down and across to Elder, back to 23rd.
So I got to thinking... is this for real? Do we really still do this, in every neighborhood in America? Every day? It doesn't seem possible that this relic of our culture still exists, but I had proof. Too much proof for me. I came home and looked at some post-office statistics. Holy Cow!
Anyway, that cow in Mysore was incredibly efficient. She costs her owner nothing, I think, and yields milk daily (probably twice daily). On the other hand, we have the USPO... hardly efficient. Nearly 600,000 workers, 220,000 vehicles (averaging 10.3 mpg in 2010), and with a net loss of $8.37 billion in 2010. That loss is covered by our so-generous taxpayers... or, more accurately, by our children and grandchildren, since the federal government now borrows 42 cents of every dollar it spends. The postal system is an unaffordable relic of times past. Their competitors... mostly UPS and Fed Ex, plus DHL... make money. Why not just end the monopoly on mail and let the for-profit sector do the work? We simply must face the fact that we cannot keep borrowing such huge quantities of money, and the post office would be a great place to start the efficiency campaign. Obama, are you listening?
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