Mailing It In

When you work in the software industry, you think that anything can be fixed quickly with code. This is often true. A dedicated programmer can change the behavior of a program dramatically, adding features that were not there, provided he or she can get access to the code.

But many other disciplines seem pretty content with the status quo. They figure, stuff works pretty well, why bother? One advantage with the status quo is that once you figured it out, that's it. It's not changing much.

Most apartment complexes have these very tiny mailboxes. The idea is for the postman to open 6 mailboxes simultaneously, and shove the mail into the tiny compartment. Of course, anything larger than a Pringles can would not fit in, so any large package you might hope to receive has to come to you a different way.

Heaven forbid that the apartment complex actually has someone that maintains a mail area 24 hours a day. We can have groceries 24 hours a day because, well, because people are going to buy something. There's no gain for an apartment complex to have this incredibly useful service for you.

But even that wouldn't be necessary if mailboxes were actually a suitable size. Enough to hold, say, a big breadbox. Houses have it a little better. The mailboxes for most houses are bigger. Even so, it's still not that huge.

And yet, despite the proliferation of larger packages being sent by Amazon and other overnight delivery companies, what has been done about handling these packages?

Nothing.

The closest thing you get is paying a place like Mailboxes, etc. to get large packages for you.

In software, this wouldn't happen. Someone would have come up with a solution (which doesn't mean that every solution has been figured out--note that despite UNIX being older than Windows and Windows having been around for years and years, it does not support soft links, using something far inferior--the shortcut).

Oh, you know how it is. It would be so expensive for apartment complexes around the country to actually fix this up. They want to put their big cost down up front, and then never spend a penny again if they can get away with it.

Someone told me about toilets getting backed up. How about that? It's similar to this automatic coffee maker at work. It dispenses a fixed amount of hot water, as having a sensor to know when it gets full is way too complex. So, if the water that's dispensed is wrong, it just flows over. Surely, if we have a bunch of engineers, they can think of a better toilet? But has the design changed much?

The biggest change that I'm aware of is the low-flow toilet, which was meant to conserve water. In, what? Fifty years of toilets? How much has really changed?

To be fair, the nice thing about simple designs is that they are simple. Once you start writing programs to run this or that, then someone has to maintain it, and so forth.

We're in the midst of a computer revolution, that's affected how we get our information, and yet, many things in our lives are still the way it's been since forever. Ultimately, it's money. Software, being easily copied, is often much more malleable than any physical structure.

And speaking of some forms of mail? Why bother? Maybe these companies should merely send PDFs. I could dispose of them more easily, and I wouldn't lose the material if I didn't want to. It's amazing we still use as much paper as we do, because people still can't use computers.

Next time you look at what's advanced, think about all the things that haven't changed in a while, and ask if they're really as good as they could be.