by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-19 16:44:59+00:00
Often the postal mail is required by regulations, such as when your bank sends a notice or disclosure, or some creditor sends you a bill, or a government agency sends something in the mail. Whether or not you’ve gone “paperless” matters not, when they are legally required to send a paper letter. And it drives me crazy, because it never fails that the most important and most informative letters are not even backed-up by an electronic copy, and so these days, the onus is on me to scan the letter into Google Drive or OneDrive, and I've been using my smartphone to do it, one page at a time. And that's the only way I can keep a searchable, accessible record of the most important communications, by scanning them back in from the paper.

But here's what the email situation looks like, with a USPS analogy: you receive a letter from the tax office that says they have a message for you. And the letter has arrived at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday evening.

So on Monday, you get your ID and you drive down to the tax office. Except you can't immediately drive, because you don't own a car, so you walk to the library to borrow a car. The library says that you can borrow a car, but they need another household bill that you didn't bring with you. So you walk back home, and you get the documentation the library needs, and you walk back to the library, and you borrow a 1995 car, and you drive to the tax office, and the tax office says that the message for you says that they need a check from your bank.

So you go home, because it was already late in the day. And then you walk back to the library, and you borrow another car, and it’s a different car, so you learn how to use this car, and you drive to the bank. And you ask the bank for a check. And the bank needs additional ID, so you go home, and you gather all the ID that the bank needs, and then you drive back to the bank, and you ask them for a check again, and then the teller says that they can give you a check, but the checks are issued in a different branch. So they give you a voucher token for your money, and then you have to go drive to the other bank branch across town to get your money.

So you arrive at the bank branch that has the money, and after 15 days you have the correct ID and all the documentation and you also have the voucher and the token to take the money out and get the check. So you obtain the check, and then you take it home and return your library car, because it's late in the day.

And then you wait over the weekend, because it was a holiday weekend. And then you gather your ID again and you put your tax check in your pocket, and you go walk back to the library, and you borrow a third car, and then you drive to the tax office, and then you try to show them your check. And the responsible person at the tax office isn't there because they're a short staffed. And there's a sign on the door that says to go drive downtown to the main tax office, and that's where you’ll be able to drop off your check.

So you arrive at the main tax office, and there's a queue 2 hours long, and there's a security guard who pretends not to recognize your ID. And you get in a rigmarole with the security guard for a while, and a second security guard comes along and they have a nice extended discussion over whether your ID is from a Cracker Jack box.

And so eventually they escort you to a disused lavatory in the sub basement and it's got a sign that says “beware the leopard”, and the bureaucratic functionary at the desk accepts your check, and then you go outside to the downtown parking lot that cost $12, and your car has broken down because it was a library car and library cars are always the most unreliable ones.

So this is what it's like online, using email and online cloud services to retrieve documents because “email is insecure”.