**Should I have made more of an effort to cultivate my neighbors? **
I’ve been making some cash lately by eBaying my comic book collection. It’s worked out very well for me, and I’ve even had some left over funds for less urgent needs - like anime.
However, I’ve just found out that the last purchase I’d made was delivered on April 20th. Whereupon it fell into limbo.
Based on this information, I’ve also come to realize that I’ve got to bite the bullet for the one shipment of comics that I’d sent out that seems to have disappeared as well. I suspect some fucking twit opened the package looking for something they could sell or use. So, now, in an effort to be a reasonable person - I’m going to refund the purchase price on those. Which hurts me more than it might someone who actually has a job with income other than selling off a limited supply of chattels.
What really burns me though is that I doubt that the sock-fucking egoist who’s stolen these items will get any enjoyment from them. He got 11 miscellaneous Ranma comics, a two issue X-over between Gold Digger and NHS, and two mid series DVDs of Patlabor.
Not exactly items that the world is beating a path to my door to buy.
There’s a part of me that wants to start setting up a sting for this yahoo. Get a nice exploding dye brick, and ship it around…
Alas, not legal for a private citizen.
Maybe I’ll look into a wireless webcam - see if I can spot the goat-filcher in action, sometime.
I can only hope that the Postal Inspectors get a hold of this yahoo. 10 years/$10000 fines look good right about now.
When I lived I a large city some years back (whose name translates to “City of Angels”), I tried on three separate occasions to get a new Social Security card, having changed my name due to marriage. Alas, the card would be mailed to me, and that would be the end of it. My son also had a magazine stolen from our mail before it was ever delivered every single month for nearly a year. Fortunately, they were very nice people who, when I called, not only believed me but send the kid’s magazine out in a plain brown wrapper with no identifiers so it would make it to him. It was just ridiculous.
Of course, then when I didn’t want my mail delivered, since I’d moved and turned in valid and timely forwarding address, I got absolutely zero mail for two months. A friend finally went by my old house, which was sitting empty, and there was two months of mail sitting there. :wally
I’ve given up on expecting anything from the postal service except aggravation.
I buy most of my books (used) through Amazon’s Marketplace, and many of the sellers are using a USPS service called Delivery Confirmation. It’s cheap, I think 40 cents or so, and it provides proof of delivery. That means that if a buyer says they didn’t get the package, Amazon refunds their money, rather than the seller.
I don’t know if ebay has something similar, but it might be worth checking into.
If I were you, I’d start stating in my eBay TOS that I would not refund missing packages if the buyer did not opt for purchasing postal insurance. Kudos to you for paying out of your own pocket for the stolen package- but I wouldn’t next time. If the buyer doesn’t want to spring for the extra dollar and half to insure the (possibly rare and expensive) comics, well, that’s the risk they take… shit happens all the time during mail transporting.
We had mail theft going on in our neighborhood, and finally had to chip in as a neighborhood and buy the big locking mailboxes on a concrete base. Mail thieves like the kind of mailboxes where they just pull up in their cars, open mailboxes, take out the contents, and drive away. It takes them all of 20 seconds, if that. I think with the locking ones, they could still get in if they wanted to (lock pick) but that would increase their chances of being noticed.
The particular persons of interest in the local theft ring were eventually caught - not sure how - and eventually went to trial. I know this because I got a form in the mail, allowing me to report any damages as a result of the thefts. That was the first I knew they’d stolen my mail too. I know my neighbors across the street had collection agencies making their lives hell for them for a long time, because the thieves had fake checks written in my neighbors’ names.
I don’t know of any mail being stolen since the locking boxes went in.
I doubt that’s even legal. The seller has a responsibility to get the goods to the purchaser, at least according to everything I’ve ever heard. It’s not the buyer’s fault. After all, imagine the stuff got stolen right out of OtakuLoki’s mailbox - is that the purchaser’s responsibility?
Actually, on both packages that I’ve lost to the thief there was Delivery Confirmation. The problem is that it’s of limited utility for me: The package I was selling was stolen before the Post Office accepted it; the package I bought was stolen after it was listed as being delivered to the address.
And whatever gripes I have about the USPS, I have to say I don’t disbelieve their reporting here. The items were stolen either before or after they left their immediate custody. It makes things like getting an insurance claim processed rather difficult. And for similar reasons, means that I’m SOL with most of the eBay/PayPal protection plans. The most I’m hoping for, honestly, is that I’ll be able to get the Post Office to refund the money I spent for shipping on the package I was selling, since they’ve no record of the shipping label being used. And that’s a hope, not an expectation.
And, honestly, while the monetary loss sucks - it’s not what’s burning my poor, stolen, felched goat.
I purchase my postage online, so there’s no need for me to actually take the package to the Post Office - just leave the package with outgoing mail, and away it goes.
Providing, of course, there’s no goat burning, filching, felching mail thief with access to the outgoing mail.
I’m sorry you’re getting ripped off. Might I suggest a couple of solutions. I don’t know what you’re schedule is like and what conveniences are at your disposal but one thing you could do is to not leave an outgoing package for a carrier to pick up. Take the package directly to the post office so you know it at least made it that far unscathed. Second, in regard to incoming mail, alert the post master of your station of the suspected thefts, ask that they hold your mail at the station for you to pick up in person during business hours. Get a post office box. Buy getting a box you can access your mail 24 hours a day as the doors to the lobby where the boxes are kept are never locked (this may not hold true in extremely high-crime areas)
I recall one morning, heading out the door to work, noticing a package, obviously a large book, under the mailboxes by my door. Looking at it, I saw that it was addressed to the apartment upstairs and marked “return to sender”. That evening, coming back in from work the box was empty. Curious, I turned it over to see what had been inside. It was the Physicians’ Desk Reference. You would think that people who could understand the PDR and people who steal mail off of other people’s front steps would be, for the most part, mutually exclusive.
And if I ever find out who did this - I’ll be tempted to indulge in an old revenge fantasy I’d developed a few years ago:
Take the goat-felcher out for a night on the town. Lots of booze, food, and other ingredients for a good time. Then, at the end of the night, when the goat-filcher’s sense of self-preservation has dropped below nil - take a final detour to a fly-by-night* tattoo parlor.
And have the word THIEF tattooed across the goat-felcher’s forehead. :eek:
*I have no idea where I’d find such an artist - hence the fact it’s a revenge fantasy. Still, thinking of the life-long troubles such a tattoo might cause warms my cold, black heart.
I had a problem with mail theft too. So many of my Netflix DVD’s somehow never made it back to them that I had to cancel my account.
I made a report to the postmaster general who responded back saying that “we generally don’t invesigate mail theft if we don’t have multiple complaints from a neighborhood or street.”
I mail everything from work now and have a locking mailbox.
Two days after I got the new box, someone dented it with a blunt object. Apparently they were pissed off that I cut off their supplies of free DVDs.
Sharpie[SUP]®[/SUP] markers, no tattoo artist needed, minimal jail time. (I had much the same fantasy when half my textbooks were stolen and suggested it to the school security officer. That man had no sense of humor or justice.)
