Your Hot Hardware Is Making Post Office Hardware Obsolete

Not everything in your e-mail inbox is a winning lottery notification from a deposed Nigerian dictator selling Cialis. You're getting a lot of messages that the US Postal Service used to deliver. And the USPS is waking up to reality, and removing tens of thousands of those ubiquitous blue drop-off boxes from city streets because they're  empty all the time.

"People just don't write letters as often anymore," said Yvonne Yoerger, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service. "It's not a part of our culture anymore." The removal of mailboxes, though, represents more than just a transition to the Internet age. To many, it means the decline of an American icon. Seen and used by hundreds of millions of Americans for more than a century, the corner mailbox is one of the most recognized pieces of Americana, said Nancy Pope, a historian at the National Postal Museum in Washington.

Now what are we going to lean on, when we wait for our turn to use the Public Pay Phone? Never mind.

Read the whole thing, and wonder when the last time you put a letter in a drop-off box was.