This is what happens...

This is what happens ... when government and unions are in charge!

On October 24, a vendor in Hong Kong shipped a package of LED lamps to me (these were odd light bulbs that I couldn't find locally).  They used DHL for the delivery.  DHL got it to Salt Lake City on October 28 (that's over a weekend) – nice, fast, efficient delivery service.  But ... then DHL handed it to the U.S. Post Office for “final delivery” – in other words, the so-called “last mile”.

I do not have my package.  So this morning I set about tracking it down.  I called DHL, and they gave me an incredibly long U.S. Post Office tracking number: 30 decimal digits long.  That's a crazy big number – big enough to give a million unique numbers to every single star in the universe.  To say it a different way, if the Post Office assigned a number to every single piece of mail it delivered, that would provide a unique number for a million trillion trillion years worth of mail.  Seems a bit excessive, doesn't it?  The DHL representative and I wasted about 10 minutes of our lives just making sure I had the right darned number.  I wonder what genius at the Post Office decided their number had to be twice as long as anyone else's?

But that's just the beginning.  Here's what the logistical geniuses at the Post Office did with my package.  There's a truck that delivers mail destined to Paradise.  It travels from Salt Lake City (where DHL handed my package to the Post Office) to Paradise six days a week, in the morning.  The Post Office did not put my package on that truck.  Instead, they sent it to Mt. Pleasant, Utah, about 50 miles south of Salt Lake City (further away from Paradise).  Then they sent it by some very slow service (I'm guessing llama) to their distribution center in Aurora, Colorado – 550 miles from Paradise.  The folks in Aurora then put it on a truck – back to Salt Lake City, Utah.  Seriously.  They really did that!  If I'm lucky, I'll get it on Friday.

I feel like I'm seeing a vision of what will happen to our healthcare system if the progressives succeed in turning it into a single (government) payer system...