Today a box of chocolates I ordered for a friend as a Christmas gift arrived via the United States Postal Service.  The box has a huge sticker on it that says “Fragile–Handle With Care”.  But it’s hard to read, on account of the box being smashed.

I’m a pretty easy-going guy, but this really annoyed me.  I realize the mere existence of “Fragile-Handle With Care” stickers is an admission that they can’t manage to not destroy some of the mail they process, but they should at least have the ability to not destroy the ones that actually tell anyone looking at it “don’t destroy me”. Could they at least put those on the conveyor belt that doesn’t have giant crushing hammers like the one Natalie Portman had to dodge in Attack of the Clones?

This is the sort of story that my conservative readers–if I have any–will probably laugh at and say “ha ha, silly liberal; government is the problem!” This is the sort of story that makes people get mad at the government, and thus inclined to listen to anti-government politicians. As somebody (maybe Dave Barry?) once observed–I’m paraphrasing–it’s easy to become pretty much of a John Bircher when your main encounters with the governemnt consist of the Post Office, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the IRS, which is the case for most people.

It’s a vicious cycle, of course; government agencies screw up, people become angry at them, so they elect people who will defund the agencies, so they screw up even more, and so on.