The Post Office Mail Sorter
Originally intended to be another of Johnson's famous organs, this device was adapted into a mail sorter (through such implements as a hopper and the presence of imps) in his continual striving for functional improvement. Johnson used in the sorter various gears and other rotating components which for tidiness he constructed with the value for pi of exactly three (rather than the customary "three and a bit") as the ratio between their circumference and their diameter.
The Sorter itself came to be known as the New Pie, and eventually caused the downfall of the Ankh-Morpork postal service as the machine started sorting mail that hadn't been written yet. The then-heads of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office tried to use this to their advantage, as they could deliver future mail to people a matter of minutes after (or before) the writer had created it, thus creating a practically instantaneous mail service.
This idea was flawed however, as in some cases, post that was supposed to belong to the other half of a universal bifurcation emerged—such mail was never meant to exist in the normal timeline of the Discworld. The damage caused to space-time in the immediate vicinity of the machine made it a significant health hazard. It was only the physics and dimensions of the letters that enabled them to pass through safely; a chair leg for instance would come out the other side in thousands of tiny splinters.
When this was considered in combination with the ever-increasing volume of not-yet-written mail, the machine was taken out of service and smashed up by a senior postman (despite being told that its destruction could result in the end of the universe). The remains are still installed in the basement of the Post Office; as they are still hazardous, there is no obvious means of removing them. It was a prominent feature of the Post Office in Going Postal; one of Moist von Lipwig's predecessors was accidentally killed by it, and Moist himself used it to kill Mr. Gryle, a feral banshee.
Read more about this topic: Technology Of The Discworld, Inventors, Bloody Stupid Johnson
Famous quotes containing the words post, office and/or mail:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“There’s something about the dead silence of an office building at night. Not quite real. The traffic down below is something that didn’t have anything to do with me.”
—John Paxton (1911–1985)
“Always polite, fastidiously dressed in a linen duster and mask, he used to leave behind facetious rhymes signed “Black Bart, Po—8,” in mail and express boxes after he had finished rifling them.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)