4 October—In its never-ending, ever-escalating intensively malignant crusade to inconvenience and otherwise screw its remaining underserved, overcharged, decidedly unhappy customers who can’t do anything about it, the United States Postal Service came up with a new expedient it arrogantly touts as Regional Transportation Optimization.

It’s no accident that RTO started doing its damage on April Fools Day last year.

Simply put, under USPS RTO, mail—all mail, including 35-dollar-plus-premium Express Mail that used to guarantee next-day delivery for a hell of a lot less—is no longer collected at the end of the business day at post offices more than 50 miles from one of the rogue USPS’s 56 Regional Processing and Distribution Centers. Rather, it’s all bagged and held until the following morning, when it’s collected at the same time the day’s invariably belated incoming mail is dropped off for usually dilatory delivery. Unless, of course, you pay the USPS’s extortion it calls PO box rent for the privilege of delivering your own mail.

To be sure, combining delivery and collection into a single trip obviously cuts costs for the notoriously mismanaged USPS, whose politically appointed mismanagers have notoriously never given a damn about customers because they haven’t had to. Who cares, the misfits reckon, if the schmucks are further inconvenienced by another day’s delay in their mail getting delivered? Who’s gonna notice another day’s delay? If it gets delivered, that is.

The latest update available from the Postal Regulatory Commission—obviously another sick joke—indicates that an unspecified number of post offices in some 17,700 ZIP Codes (of about 28,500 ZIP Codes) have sacrificed evening collection on the altar of Regional Transportation Optimization.

And the number of sacrifices keeps growing. When the USPS buggers have fully wreaked their latest havoc, they’re looking forward to about 23,000 post offices out of some 31,000 losing evening pickups, leaving only about a quarter with anything even approaching halfway decent service.

Then, of course, the USPS buggers will be closing more post offices. Count on it. Even now, as Northfield and Morris captive postal customers well know, while it’s not uncommon for one ZIP Code to contain more than one post office, it’s becoming more common for one post office to contain more than one ZIP Code.

For the record, the USPS Connecticut primary processing center in Wallingford is notably and noticeably less than 50 miles as the crow flies—and even as the truck drives—from Litchfield and other ZIP Codes and post offices that no longer are treated to late pickups. It’s the same story all over the country.

So you won’t be surprised that the USPS has come up with all sorts of bullshit formulas to rationalize its evil anti-consumer ways. We won’t burden you with them. But it’s essentially no different from Supreme Court justices coming up with all sorts of bullshit reasons for their asinine decisions. Because, like it or not, they can do it . . .