I mailed my music catalog order (see "The Christian Consumer," below). I noticed that the postage-paid envelope they provided has the word "Rush" stamped in its upper-left corner. What does this mean? Am I supposed to believe that the Postman is going to walk faster when he sees this? The postage is the same as any other bulk mailing, which means that this will get lumped in with all those Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes entries of mine that apparently never made their way to Ed McMahon. In other words, this will get there when it gets there, and not one federal employees' union-sanctioned break sooner.

So why create this false expectation? If the customer is deceived into thinking that "Rush" actually means something, then he will expect his order to be filled more quickly than if it were going through the "regular" mail. Wouldn't it be better to put "Slow" on the envelope, so I'll be surprised when my CD's get here three weeks from now?

This is why consultants get big bucks, you know. We snoop around a company for a while, and then impart pearls of wisdom like "You should convert from MS-DOS to Windows," and "You shouldn't put 'Rush' on your return envelopes." This also explains why the Ross Perot vision of better managed government was always a mirage. It is nearly impossible to manage any large enterprise well, public or private. Government organizations just perform a bit worse because they tend to be populated by unambitious twits and are hamstrung by rules that prevent corruption and carpal tunnel syndrome. But even private organizations are vulnerable to ineptitude, wastefulness, and inflexibility. That's the beauty of Schumpeter's "creative destruction."

This is the kind of stuff I think about all day long. It's a wonder I can function at all.