Message from John Dennis

[P3D Shab Levy <shab@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have been asked by John Dennis to post the following message which is
scheduled to appear in the editorial page of STEREO WORLD now being
printed.
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Bulk Mail Delay Sets New Record With STEREO WORLD Vol. 22  No. 6!

For many years, STEREO WORLD has been mailed to NSA members paying the
basic membership fee via the lowest possible postage rate - a non-profit
organization bulk rate. While these issues generally arrive one or two
weeks later than those sent at the first-class mail rate, delays much
longer than that have generally been regional or local problems - until our
issue dated Jan./Feb. '96, Vol. 22 No. 6!
Somehow, the entire shipment of that issue was delayed or misplaced at some
Postal Service Distribution Center with a resulting gap of over a month
between the arrival of the first-class mailing vs. the bulk rate mailing.
This left the great majority of NSA members waiting and wondering not only
about the magazine, but also about all the 1996 NSA convention material
inserted in it.
Needless to say, the SW staff, NSA Secretary Larry Hess and the mailing
service company in Ohio were also wondering what was wrong. Calls to
various levels of Postal Service management resulted in a trace, and
magazines eventually started arriving at members' homes around the U.S. in
mid May. (We may never learn exactly what happened.) The uneasy thought
that the mailing had disappeared down some post office black hole had us
within days of ordering another press run of the issue and new copies of
the whole set of six convention forms for a special mailing to keep the
Rochester arrangements on track.
We apologize to the thousands of NSA members who may have thought they'd
been literally cut of from the WORLD, or who knew of people who'd long ago
received the issue and convention material via first-class mail, or who
read or heard about all the cyberumors bouncing around the internet. For
now, we're told that a switch to another mail category like second-class
isn't practical for an organization of our size, so we'll continue
advancing the SW schedule back up the calendar, making future postal delays
at least seem a little less severe.

                                     - John Dennis, editor, STEREO WORLD
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