I’m not generally one of those haters on the post office - I think it’s great that they’ll mail any document to anywhere in the country in two days for like 45 cents, or whatever a letter costs these days. But customer service with those guys is abysmal. Just absolutely, bafflingly, Kafkaesquely abysmal.
My mailman’s most obvious talent is delivering me other people’s mail and apparently giving my mail to other people too. I’ve had mail slipped under my door that I can assume was delivered to the wrong person, but thankfully to a neighbor nice enough give me my stuff.
Do I have to deal with this crap? Is there something that will actually work (not filling out a “Contact Us” form on a website) I can do to stop, or at least curb, this nonsense?
Contacting your Post Office can help. If they get enough complaints, they do eventually respond. You might need to get your neighbors involved. (It also helps if you work from home, watch a mailman put a note in your box claiming that he knocked on your door and you weren’t home, and you can show up at the post office with the note before the mailman gets there with the package he said he couldn’t deliver.)
For a more immediate benefit, you might want to get a PO Box and have anything important delivered there.
I was having a problem like this and I put a letter in my box to the mail carrier. It said something along the lines of “You’ve been making a lot of mistakes and it’s really inconveniencing me. Can you try to be better so I don’t have to contact your boss?”
It totally worked! I rarely get the neighbor’s mail anymore, for a couple years now.
If it happens a ton*, call your local post office - the one that handles your house’s deliveries - and ask to speak to the delivery supervisor. Give a concise explanation of the problem, its frequency, and your address.
My wild-ass guess is that, like many post offices, the problem is probably that they don’t have enough regulars to cover their routes so your route is being covered by the newbie of the month, including probably someone different sorting the mail versus delivering it. So no one gets familiar enough with it to catch mistakes that well.
*Like, more often than a piece every month or so - because shit happens and the machine sorting also screws up, but the carriers aren’t supposed to be checking on that because it’s not “supposed” to be screwed up and they’re told to not waste time resorting the mail because the machines save time…
Yeah, pretty much what Ferret Herder said. My little pocket of neighborhood had a mail carrier of 25 years or so, who was very good. With all the students in my area, it’s no small feat to get everything right. When he retired, I had a couple of months where I’d get home and find someone else’s mail in my box. I’d go on a little delivery route of my own for a few minutes a couple times a week for those couple months, re-distributing mail around my building and next door.
There’s been another regular guy since then and it stopped being an issue. I’d contact the PO and talk to a supervisor directly.
When I lived in a tiny hell hole of a rural New Mexico town, this happened all the time. Even had a very expensive item delivered to the wrong street and that neighbor brought it to me (a Nikon camera).
I caught up with the delivery person the next day and told her what happened (several times had happened with letters and bills, this was first time with a valuable package) and she said, “You got it, didn’t you?”
So, I escalated the complaint to the local post office. Their response: “You got it, didn’t you?”
Yeah, I know, New Mexico and their weird ideas of customer service, what? Got that kind of shit there in grocery stores, gas stations, the police…
MeanOldLady, you’re in Chicago, right? If so, just pray that the Lincoln Park Annex is not responsible for your mail, because I have never, and I do mean, “never,” had any satisfaction in trying to get them to address any complaints I have. I had one on-going issue that I involved the 1-800 number people in (who were actually very kind and as helpful as they could be), and they were starting to get frustrated with the lack of responsiveness from them.
I also discovered that it is virtually impossible to get any contact information for the Postmaster of Chicago. The USPS web site has a search function where you can find his or her name, but that’s all. Apparently, you’re supposed to address any correspondence to them c/o your local post office. I’m sure that works just fine </sarcasm>
ZipperJJ’s suggestion is probably the best, or see if you can be home at a time when you can actually speak to the carrier face-to-face. I’ve been able to correct a few minor annoyances that way recently.
So when the mail isn’t being delivered correctly, they want you to send mail about it. That’s some catch, that Catch-22.
It’s rather like something that I encountered many years back. Whenever the phone system went out, they would announce that there were problems with the phone system. Via automated phone messaging. :eek:
Apparently the best thing to do, which a great many people ARE doing in this on-line age, is simply move as much of your business as reasonably possible on-line.
I have always been a bit of a Luddite, tending to be slow to adopt all the newest snazziest technology. I resisted paying bills on-line for a long long time. I now pay most (but not all) of my bills on-line. It was the shitty customer service from the Post Office that made the difference for me.
I’ve used a P. O. Box for most of the past 25 years. The MAIN reason is not due to home delivery fuck-ups so much, but rather, just so I have to give out my home address to as few parties as possible. Also, apartment mailboxes aren’t highly secure. The ones here have been vandalized a few times.
The major customer service screw-up I’ve had, has always been to do with forwarding my mail every time I move. Three times in the past 15 years, I’ve moved and had trouble dealing with mail forwarding. (The exact details of the problem have been different every time.) Of course, I was always very prompt in advising all my correspondents of my new address, so mostly there was no problem there.
So my strategy has been: I don’t even both telling the Post Office any more when I move. I simply abandon that P. O. Box at the end of the 6-month or 12-month period that I paid for. I advise ALL my correspondents directly of my new address. If I’m within driving distance of my old box, I’ll check once in a while during the remaining time that the old box exists.
I keep a careful written check-list of all the parties I think I should advise. I check when I advise them. I put another check when they actually send something to my new address, so I know that they’ve actually gotten my new address.
Same problem here in the UK. Wherever I live, seemingly. There’s no excuse - the doors are numbered (mail goes through slots in doors here) and so are the envelopes. It’s just a matter of matching the funny symbols on the mail to the funny symbols on the door, but that’s tricky, apparently.
Hmm, I’m never around when the mail is delivered. I might be occasionally on Saturdays, but I don’t even know when the mailman comes. I’ll try the note in my mailbox first, see if that helps. If it doesn’t, I will contact the post office. Ugh, when I’ve previously had mail issues, calling results in my being told more or less to go fuck myself. I once had a supervisor call me to tell me there was no problem. Uhh, yes there was, you lazy tit. I mean, even if there’s nothing she can do about it, the complete and clear lack of giving a shit at all was just… enough about that.
Direct communication with the mailman might be best, but if that goes nowhere, it never hurts to try to resolve it with the carrier’s supervisor. Well, it hurts a little in the form of enormous frustration when calling proves futile, but I’ll give it a go.
It was very helpful, thank you!
They are not, but the kind people at my local post office are equally… not helpful.
Miss Mean Old Lady, If I recall correctly from a post you made some time back, I used to live in the same neighborhood where you currently live (near the blue line stop where semi trucks regularly get stuck under the overpass?)…I have no advice, but boy do I sympathize…
(She’s not exaggerating, guys. I still remember the odd incident where our building’s mail was delivered at 8pm by being tossed on the floor of the lobby by a guy who wasn’t even in uniform. I’m not sure what he had done to the real mail man, but he did at least get the mail to the correct building.)
We’ve had a number of problems with our mail delivery in the past year. This included mis-delivered and undelivered mail. The latest issues we had involved package tracking. The tracking would show the package out for delivery and then delivered but it wouldn’t actually be there. A day or more later the tracking might be updated to say a note was left because no one was home. A bit later, the package would actually be delivered with no note ever appearing. Sometimes they’d be too lazy to mess with the tracking that much and it would just be marked as delivered one day and randomly show up four days later.
Talking to anyone who works for the post-office was completely ineffective. My wife got frustrated enough that she sent emails to our congressman and both senators. The staff of one of the senators followed up and had words with the local post-office. We haven’t had any issues since. So going as far over the carrier’s head as possible is an option, too.
the “we tried to deliver” note when I’d actually been home. The lady at the PO explained that the particular carrier is “slow” and they give him only the notes - he does leave them in the right box, whereas if they give him packages the whole decision tree of “ring bell, wait for a while, if no answer leave note” confused him no end. In fact, she had my box right there.
for a while I lived in a place where the postcode did not correspond to a single building, but to several. Unless you got someone who was familiar with the situation, couriers and mailmen kept going to the wrong building because it was where giving the postcode to the GPS took them.
This week I’ve been working in a location that doesn’t show up in the map, you have to give the GPS the postcode for another place nearby. I’ve never needed to receive mail here but my coworkers say it’s such a pain they often tell people to send stuff to a different company location about a mile away.
You can put in an order to have all (or just parcels) held for pick-up.
Don’t know how long they will hold.
I got an unexpected “Attempt to Deliver” notice - gave it to the (old-timer, very efficient) clerk, who brought out a parcel and placed it, label down, on the counter. This guy doesn’t screw up, so I didn’t bother checking the label.
When I opened it, it was obvious I should have looked.
That box sat there for months, until I decided that, if I was going to return it, I would have done so, so I just kept the contents. Bad boy
The other oddity was: I got a birthday card or two and 2 (cheap) gifts addressed to my name - obviously not me.
I decided that if these people were sending even cheap gifts to someone whose address they did not know, I wasn’t going to correct them. These were co-worker type things; let the awkwardness begin…
They were addressed to me at my address - that makes them mine. So stuff it.
(I knew of at least 3 of use with the same common first, no-so-common-surname in the area. 2 of us did the same kink of consulting work - made for some interesting calls),
