I live in the Oklahoma City, and our mail carrier is apparently a little “challenged” when it comes to reading numbers. We are constantly receiving our neighbors mail. We live at 1217 and sometimes get mail addressed to 1213 or something from an entirely different street. It is so bad that we have our important mail delivered to our work addresses, as I’m sure some of our mail is being delivered to other homes, also. I literally get something delivered to us in error a couple times every week.
Instead of walking over to our neighbors, I have begun writing ‘delivered to wrong address’ on the letter and putting it back in the mailbox for the mail carrier to see that it was delivered to the wrong home. I am just unsure how to proceed any further, as it has not helped. I don’t want to complain and have the only result is making our mail carrier upset and have them retaliate by doing it more. Is there anything I can do to complain anonymously to the postal service about a specific mail carrier?
(Wife of a USPS letter carrier here.) Do call the branch that your mail is delivered out of, and ask to speak to the delivery supervisor. You do need to give your address as otherwise they won’t know which route/which part of the route is being screwed up.
Also, please try to give a number of recent dates when this has happened. You won’t always have the same letter carrier every day - they do have (typically) one day off per week where someone else is carrying their route. On top of that there are vacation/sick days, or days when their route is overburdened with mail and the carrier has had to “give away” parts of the route. That way the appropriate carrier can be determined. My husband isn’t perfect, but the overwhelming number of complaints like this that he gets come from his days off when someone substituted onto his route.
Another question, not as important - do you recall if screwed-up letters had a printed-on bar code along the bottom of the envelope? If so, these were machine sorted and the carriers are told that they are not to re-sort those letters. They’re expected to catch any mistakes (which aren’t officially acknowledged) on the route, but may miss letters here and there stuffed in amongst others that are properly sorted. (It’s called “D.P.S. mail,” which stands for “Delivery Point System”.)
I had a mailman who, at various times, “decided that [**I] no longer lived there.” It bothered me greatly but there are a few people in life you do not want to mess with and the guy that delivers important documents is one of them. Nevertheless I must concur that you should just contact the office. I had no luck with the office in resolving the issue, it happened again three months later, but they were cordial and only tried to blame it on me twice during one phone call. You could probably even get your own mailman on the phone if you call early enough.
Which reminds me of a story. When I worked at McDonalds some years ago we always got clever jerks in drive through. One time a coworker at front drive through was about to hand some of these clever jerks some food, but pulled the bag back at the last moment. “Guys,” he said, “never mess with the people that make your food.” Hehe. We never did anything to food, that would really be beyond the pale, but really, it’s good advice, because there are people out there who would.
What Ferret Herder said. Talk to the supervisor. There is no reason to assume that the carrier will get upset and retaliate. If your carrier is like the majority of the carriers I know, his reaction will be “oh, crap, I need to pay more attention to this” and try harder. If he is like some others I know, he is not smart/organized enough to effectively retaliate and is just rushing the route to get out of it.
Also as she said, the specifics of your address and date of the mishaps matter, so it is hard to be anonymous.
If that fails, you have very little recourse, I am afraid. There is no straight forward mechanism to report bad service the way there is for fraud on their website, so you are stuck mostly with dealing with the branch itself.
You don’t actually have to call or discuss the issue in person. In your local post office you can find a card to fill out to report problems. IIRC it is yellow. It goes directly to the postmaster and I believe a copy is sent to a higher office as well.
I have this problem where I live. I live at (let’s say) 1234 75th St and there is a giant office building at 1234 7th St whose mail I receive a lot. Sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse, but when it’s bad, I get incorrect mail almost every day. I have found that contacting the local post office gets me reassured that the problem will be addressed, but nothing ever changes.
I used to scrawl “delivered to wrong address” with a sharpie marker on things and put them back in the mailbox, but as I got more and more irritated, the scrawl got bigger and bigger, to the point where I would just write “WRONG ADDRESS AGAIN” in letters that covered the whole envelope. Eventually I got tired of this and just started sticking them back in the mailbox unmarked. They still seem to get the idea.
I work as a supervisor at the USPS plant in Oklahoma City, specifically with sorting mail into delivery order. If you’re having such a problem that you can’t trust important mail to be delivered to your house, then we need to go about seeing what we can do to get this resolved. Carriers are held accountable for misdelivering the mail, and I can most likely put you in contact with your carriers supervisor or the postmaster for the station. If you’ll let me know your zipcode i can find out the phone number and who you need to talk to. If you would prefer email, private message me and I’ll give you an email to see it’s forwarded to the appropriate person.
Can I hijack for question? Nearly 40 years ago I was a summer sub carrier, and did lots of different routes. This was long before barcodes and automatic sorting of addresses. They never let me sort the mail into delivery order, which was good since I would have started the route about noon some days. What’s the process nowadays? Back then there were little cubbyholes, two addresses per, and you sorted left or right. How much is automatically sorted into delivery order, and how much is manual? Does the OCR sometimes miss things, or are Ss and 5s sometimes confused?
To the others: back when I did it, my office at least was very serious about delivering the mail quickly and accurately. I know the postal inspectors watched me at least one day. The mistakes we see are either things sticking together, or letters addressed to the same number, different street. If a missort is in the middle of a stack of letters, it is very likely not going to be noticed.