I asked this before and I need more help. My postal service is getting worse and worse. It is now I am not getting anything.
I have a locked mailbox, I have my name properly on my mailbox and yet my mail doesn’t come. I sent myself one letter each day last week and not one has come.
When I complain to the post office all they can say is “I should send it certified return receipt.”
Where else can I go. It is obvious there is something wrong and my local station Logan Square won’t help.
I remember your other post. I think I recommended couriers for the “has to get there” stuff, but that obviously won’t do if you’re not receiving stuff. Two options I can think of, besides bitching up the chain of command at the post office. One is get a P.O. Box to receive mail, the other is to get one of those non-USPS mail drops (which are essentially privately run PO boxes).
Good luck!
I didn’t see your earlier post, but remember the Chicago area as being in the news a few years back about mail literally being thrown OUT rather than delivered. If you slap a 33-cent stamp on an envelope, you have a right to believe at least ONE of your letters addressed to yourself should arrive.
I’d file a complaint with the Postmaster General. Perhaps a way to do it would be to go to the post office, purchase a 33-cent stamp, get a receipt for the stamp and the clerk’s name (making a note of the date and time), slap the stamp on your envelope and hand it to the aforementioned clerk. If you still don’t get your letter within 4-5 days, provide all of this information in your complaint to the Postmaster General.
The U.S. Postal service, btw, has a website here…I use it all the time. And my really important mail gets sent priority with a delivery confirmation receipt. (Haven’t had one NOT get there yet…but when I send something to Chicago, I use UPS or certified mail.)
After living in an apartment in New York for over a year, my post office suddenly started returning mail addressed to me. (Junk mail got through just fine, thank you very much.) What alerted me was a call from the telephone company asking for my new billing address. The explanation I got from the bright sparks at the post office after weeks of run-around, was that even though my name was on the outside of the mail box, it had to be on the inside where the carrier could see it. They just shrugged when I told them I had been receiving mail with no problem for over a year.
You might check with your postal carrier or post office to see if there is some similar rule about having your name in some hidden area in your mail box where you live.
Virtually yours,
DrMatrix
marxxx wrote:
I asked this before and I need more help. My postal service is getting worse and worse. It is now I am not getting anything.
I have a locked mailbox, I have my name properly on my mailbox and yet my mail doesn’t come. I sent myself one letter each day last week and not one has come.
When I complain to the post office all they can say is “I should send it certified return receipt.”
There’s a typically bullshit answer for you. You are supposed to spend $2.95 to send a letter to yourself? I don’t think so.
Obviously you talked to a supervisor, or clerk, who misunderstood the problem.
Where else can I go. It is obvious there is something wrong and my local station Logan Square won’t help.
Where else can you go?
Try posting your question in the usnet group alt.snail-mail. There are many people there who can perhaps give you a better answer, but you might also have to be more specific.
Complaining to the top ain’t gonna work here, the postmaster general etc., because your problem is on the bottom.
Call the station, and ask to speak to the carrier of your route. If you don’t know which specific route you are on, you can find out by looking up your own address, in the zip code lookup section of usps.gov.
Start at the bottom, ask the carrier why you get no delivery. They may have your address tagged as vacant, or some other problem.
Supervisors rarely know this specific information, if you call, they write out a note, slap it down on the carrier case, or maybe never even pass it on at all.
The carrier may be entirely unaware that there is a problem, and yes, most do care.
Start at the bottom, ask the guy who delivers it. As someone else said, the name on the outside may mean nothing, you might have to have it inside the box, or if you are at a mutliple dwelling address, does your mail contain your full correct address, including apartment number?
Do you leave for periods of time and never pick up you mail, so that it would appear that the address is vacant?
These are the kind of things the carrier needs to know, to correct the problem.
Ask the carrier to correct it, and make out a warning card for your address. These are reminders that are cased into the address every day for thirty days, so that anyone delivering the address can be aware of the correct handling.
If that method doesn’t correct the problem, then feel free to complain higher. Fill out a complaint card, but realize that most of the postal hierarchy above >carrier>line supervisor>station manager, is administrative in nature, and could care less about your delivery problem, they just pass it back to the lower three.
Start at the bottom, work up thru the first three, the others are a waste of time.
Sugar works better than vinegar, also, but you need not kiss anyones butt to get them to provide the service paid for.
Give that a try.
I don’t have any trouble with regular mail here in Berkeley, but any of those more expensive services just delay delivery, if not lose the item. Return receipt is no good if it gets lost, because they don’t trace that.
Ray
Mark,
You’re in Chicago, right?
Wasn’t there a story in Chicago about 5 or 6 years ago where they had found bags and bags of mail that had been stashed undelivered in abandoned apartments or something like that?
If I were you and I weren’t getting any mail, I would open up an account at a local “Mailboxes Etc”. Good luck to you!
Zette
You shouldn’t HAVE to pay somebodyelse to receive your own mail for you. Beside the USPS is gonna have to deliver to THAT address what makes you think they will do that? Complain UP the chain of command, local post master,Then on up to the general. You got one of those congress reps that likes to talk about how inefficient the govt is? Write a letter,hmmm,use a courier service for that.
Doc, sorry but if you got one of those boxes where the carrier opens one big door to deliver you gotta put your name INSIDE yours. That’s why you get your junk ,it is not addressed to a name.It is a reg that has been in place quite a few years now.Just depends on the carriers attitude if they get hard nosed or not. Markxxx,old comrade,be careful you don’t wanta disturb any one’s gruntle levels. ( PS Love your movies)
“Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.”-Marx
Well, for cryin out loud dude, talk to your local postmaster. Yep, visit the post office & insist on seeing him or her. But in 15 years of writing to mine [only 200 yds from me] never got nary a word back.
Zette, the local MailBox Etc gal in my city got caught taking credit cards that came in to the boxes in her MailBox etc store, used them to buy lots of stuff & put them back in the mailbox. lol.
YES - It’s TRUE - us Chicago people are mail impaired.
I feel for you - have missed several paychecks due to this phenomena. However, I can recommend (cause this worked!! for me) that you talk to the carrier themselves. My mail dude knows he’ll be getting a call from me if my check is not here on the day it’s expected - and he knows to watch for it…ok, it might sound a little anal, but it works!
And yes, there have been several stories, most recently about five years ago in one of the suburbs I was living in right down the street from me - fire started in a townhouse, and it turned out they found bags and bags of undelivered mail in this guys house…
Hey - what can I say? Al Capone, the Daley family, Gino’s, psycho postal workers, the Windy City has it all!
“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”
My friend sent several letters for years to social services {welfare} that never ‘got’ to them. Probably tossed by some idiot welfare person working at the welfare place to get welfare. So we took to taking the stuff to social services. Boring.
Say, want your pay check on time? DIRECT DEPOSIT!
I thank you guys for your help. Unfortunately, I already have worked my way up through the carrier to the PostMaster at the Logan Square office. There isn’t one carrier there is about 5 or 6.
My box is in perfect order and I had a problem earlier in July my mail was getting returned to sender. Why? No one seemed to know. Well after a talk to the mail carrier and the supervisor that stopped. Those of you who read my posts know I order CDs via the internet. Well from July to the end of September I got ALL my mail just fine. Then I noticed I hadn’t received my CD I contacted the seller. He assured me he sent it. Then it happened again.
The next was the killer. I got one of those yellow cards saying I had mail at the post office. When I went to pick it up. The post office said “They couldn’t find it.” I was so amazed that they could put the senders name, etc on the yellow card and then bug off with a lame excuse “Oh we will look into it. But it can take up to 6 months.”
I mean obviously the carrier had the package in his hands, what happened to it? Now today I got a Christmas card but none of the letters I sent to myself are there. I mean at least before when my mail wasn’t being delivered it was being returned.
Something is happening to this. And the frustrating thing is the PO answer is always…Insure it, send it certified. But it won’t really help as my CDs I bought are only valuable to me. I mean a Sheena Easton CD I buy on eBay for $30.00 is only worth like $3.00.
Well I guess the real thing is is there any other place to go to get some kind of answer. The PO has given me there answer. Certify it. Big deal so I spend more money NOT to get my mail.
Mark,
Just some further thoughts. I don’t know you or how you carry yourself. And I know that you’re a bit bugged by your mail delivery and you’ve talked to several people at your local PO. I did have a problem with mail when we moved our business into the last building we were in. If you don’t feel like you’ve already PO’d your mail carrier (or, maybe more importantly, if you think you may have), befriend him or her a bit. You don’t have to have’em over for a BBQ or anything. It really made a difference once I learned the guy’s name and managed to express to him in terms that didn’t seem to blame him, mixed with a bit of small talk that included his career, what a trial it was for us to have invoice payments going to our old address and back to the sender.
He came to recognize me amongst his various clients and started looking for our stuff and, most importantly, started finding it. I guess I’m saying you might want to try working the problem on the tactical level.
Just late evening thoughts.
Regards