I can’t summon up actual nostalgia for the postal service. Telegrams were always a much a better plot device: “It’s a telegram from my Aunt Sadie, you know, the one I’ve never mentioned before but whose pet allergies would no doubt disrupt Junior’s new dog-walking business. It seems she’s in town, but she doesn’t say where she’s staying. Junior, will you pick up those poodles and go see who just rang the doorbell?”
“You’re saying that this service of yours would be expected to send uniformed workers to every house and business in America?”
“Yes.”
“How would the homeowners and business owners summon these couriers?”
“They wouldn’t have to summon them — the postal workers would be required to just automatically show up.”
“How often?”
“Every day but Sunday.”
“And then you say that they’d carry the letter anywhere in the country? Door to door?”
“Yes.”
“So how much would it cost to take a letter from, say, St. Louis, Missouri, to Kansas City, Missouri?”
“Forty-six cents.”
“But how can you possibly do such a thing so cheaply?”
“Some people will complain that it’s too expensive.” —CNN.com.
Oops, not Cheers but Frasier.
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Watch any Charlie’s Angels rerun, and imagine how many plot complications could have been avoided with a phone call. The phone conversations on
CheersFrasier between Niles and Maris, and the mobile-phone exposition dumps on X-files where one character is sneaking around a warehouse and the other is looking in a microscope were great examples of creative uses of tech that was, at the time, still cutting edge. But I read some updated Nancy Drew to my daughter a few years ago… The way they have to make her chronically forget to charge her phone In every story is just not believable.Cyberspace killed the Mail man .
I think the dramatic/literary uses of various practices/services is a far underutilized metric for evaluation. Moving forward, I think all things should be evaluated per their usefulness in storlines :-)