USPS: "Fuck you childhood".

argatoga

Can't Start His Wank
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http://consumerist.com/5408444/north-pole-alaska-forced-out-of-santa-letter-program
New security rules have proven too complex for Alaska's post offices to bear, so they're ending their participation in Operation Santa, the 50-year-old program where letters addressed to "Santa Claus, North Pole" are answered by volunteers. The program will continue elsewhere, reports the Associated Press, but when I called the USPS to find out where letters should be addressed I was told parents should contact their local post offices for information.

The United States Postal Service has been running the current version of Operation Santa since the 1940s, when the public got to help out by responding to individual letters. In 1954, the Alaskan town of North Pole got in on the scam in a big way. But then our modern legal system got in the way, when a registered sex offender was discovered volunteering in Maryland in 2008. (I can't find any mention of what offense led to his registration, which seems like info you would need before determining whether he posed a threat. It's a lot easier to say "Omg sex offender coming after your children!" though.) This event forced the USPS to close the entire program for a few days while they addressed security issues.

Now they've addressed it: the last names and addresses of kids who write in are encrypted, and it's up to each participating post office to decide whether or not they can handle the new complexity. Alaska can't.

Anchorage-based agency spokeswoman Pamela Moody said dealing with the tighter restrictions is not feasible in Alaska.

"It's always been a good program, but we're in different times and concerned for the privacy of the information," she said.

If that news didn't shatter your holiday illusions about the postal service, here's one more thing: Anchorage is now handling all the North Pole postal cancellation marks. To be fair, North Pole was never equipped to handle the thousands of requests each year, so Fairbanks did it until this year. Fairbanks, however, is only about 10 miles northeast of North Pole, while Anchorage is about 260 miles south.
 
Santa doesn't live at North Pole anyway, it's the old Cola bottler with a similar long beard. :p
 
https://pic.armedcats.net/r/ra/ramseus/2009/11/19/GlobalWarmingSanta.gif
 
In Rovaniemi. Everyone knows that.
 
On the mountain Korvatunturi, or something like that, if my mind works properly (very rare).
 
So Santa Clause is like an Olympian (Korvatunturian?) god who rules over the world?
 
He is Father Christmas you know... in the name of the father christmas, the son and the holy ghost and all of that...
 
You know what'd be funny? If the post office returned all of those letters with something like "recipient deceased".
It'd be funny for about 10 seconds, and then you need to spend the rest of your life comforting your children...
 
You know what'd be funny? If the post office returned all of those letters with something like "recipient deceased".
It'd be funny for about 10 seconds, and then you need to spend the rest of your life comforting your children...

Until they discover money.
 
I thought he lived somewhere in Anatolia.
 
Our Santa lives in the Protheroes VW dealership over the other side of town, and he's such an advertisement whore he gets a branded VW van to drive everywhere in front of him. :|
 
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