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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Lawrence who wrote (10673)	12/15/1997 4:21:00 PM
From: Moonray	Respond to of 22053

Post office's busiest day -- 280 million cards WASHINGTON (AP) -- When the dust finally settles the post office expects to have handled 280 million cards and letters on Monday -- the busiest day of the year for an agency still benefiting from business it picked up during the UPS strike. Americans are expected to mail more than 5 billion cards and letters during the holiday season, a 2.5 percent increase over last year, said postal vice president Nicholas F. Barranca. The typical autumn day brings 95 million items to the post office, but that jumps to 150 million a day in December and Monday's total was expected to be much higher than that. Last summer's strike at United Parcel Service is still having an effect, Barranca said. ''Many mailers, taking lessons from the UPS strike, have diversified some of their shipping requirements, they are shifting some of their business to the Postal Service,'' he said. ''For the first two months of the fiscal year, which started on Sept. 13, we have seen a 15 percent increase in parcel post and a 13.5 percent increase in priority mail.'' Barranca made his comments in the post office's national operations center, a 24-hour-a-day ''war room'' where giant screens track the weather and the movement of aircraft carrying the mail. Managers in the room -- and 10 similar regional centers -- can shift planes and trucks to meet extra need, reroute around bad weather and cope with problems at individual airports around the country. To deal with all the extra seasonal business the post office has leased 108 additional cargo planes dedicated to moving Express Mail and Priority Mail, rented an additional 750,000 square feet of workspace for post offices and hired more than 40,000 seasonal employees. And Barranca urged people to help the mail move smoothly by using complete addresses, including ZIP codes and apartment numbers. People who don't know a ZIP code can get it by calling the post office or checking the agency's Internet site at www.usps.gov. He added that security requirements remain in effect, meaning that all packages that weigh more than a pound must be brought to a post office for mailing at a window. Things can still go wrong. Six carts of mail went up in flames Monday at a Washington postal annex. Officials know which packages were lost -- they were for people in the 20002 ZIP code -- because they had tried to deliver them on Saturday but the recipients weren't home. o~~~ O