So where did my lost piece of mail most likely go?

Factual Questions
1

Here’s the scenario: I walk to my local post office on a Sunday night and drop an envelope, properly addressed and stamped, to send from one part of suburban Los Angeles to another suburban part of L.A.

The piece of mail (which was my rent check) never made it. It didn’t get returned (or it hasn’t) and it hasn’t been delivered (since the check has never been cashed).

So in which part of the mail delivery process did this envelope (it was a small one, not a business size one) go astray most likely?

I’m just curious since this seems likes a fairly rare event, although with as many parts to the mail delivery process by the USPS it’s somewhat amazing that so much mail gets delivered to the right place and usually on time.

2

It might still turn up. Probably got a little misrouted.

3

Misrouted for fourteen days?

Wouldn’t the letter go on a route like this:

  1. My local post office
  2. Off to big sorting center near it
  3. Off to sorting center near its destination
  4. To smaller post office near destination
  5. To letter carrier
4

Unfortunately the automation isn’t perfect. The letters are optically scanned and bar codes are sprayed on the letter. The letter might have been misread and coded for an incorrect but similar address in your town. Further, someone - an actual human - may have misread it yet again and delivered it to that incorrect address. It could also be a mechanical error, whereby it was coded correctly but slipped into the wrong sequence. It could also have gotten munched by the sorting machine.

5

It only happens very rarely, but I’ve certainly had mail with a different address than mine put in my mailbox more than once. It’s conceivable that something like that happened to your letter and the incorrect recipient couldn’t be bothered to put it back in the mail.

6

[QUOTE=Common Tater]
Unfortunately the automation isn’t perfect. The letters are optically scanned and bar codes are sprayed on the letter. The letter might have been misread and coded for an incorrect but similar address in your town. Further, someone - an actual human - may have misread it yet again and delivered it to that incorrect address. It could also be a mechanical error, whereby it was coded correctly but slipped into the wrong sequence. It could also have gotten munched by the sorting machine.
[/QUOTE]

Postal worker checking in…

Common Tater pretty much has it nailed. The only thing I’d change slightly is the last part about being “munched”. This does happen, but it’s not common. I destroy one or two letters each day at work when I’m operating one of those machines, but I operate it at approx. 32, 000 articles per hour, and as a private mail recipient I’ve never received a damaged letter. Of those articles which do get damaged, it is extremely rare for them to get damaged to a point where both the addressee’s and the sender’s details are obliterated, and the letter will turn up in a Post Office envelope with an apology note.

If it was last Sunday, then don’t worry. It’ll turn up. When, I can’t tell you, but it will. Mis-routing is the most likely scenario here. It could have gone anywhere in the country or the world. I have seen a domestic US letter posted to Sidney, Ohio which had been to Sydney Nova Scotia and Sydney Australia twice before I intercepted it and wrote USA on it in red pen. It had been globe trotting for about six months. Some of my colleagues, both here and abroad, are none too bright.

The post office rarely actually loses stuff. Sure, we drop letters on the floor, or they get stuck in the hem of a mail bag when it is emptied, and the bag gets folded up and might not be used again for a long time, or stuff gets completely destroyed, or yes, even stolen. All these things are rare. Where we screw up, generally, is in sending stuff to the wrong place (in our defence, up to ten per cent of mail contains addressing errors).

It could also simply have been delayed because of the Christmas rush. This is unlikely in your case though, for the following reason (go get a coffee to keep awake, coz this is dull):
Your letter, being a rent payment is likely a local one. Local letters get treated like royalty, because if it is delayed, your local sorting office is to blame. If it’s to another city, those guys can be blamed (same postal administration of course, but all the corporate bullshit these days has individual area managers competing against one another), and if it’s from overseas, then it’s treated like dirt.

LIKELY:
Mis-routing.

UNLIKELY:
Delayed

EXTREMELY UNLIKELY:
Theft, destruction, loss.

All the above are equally likely or otherwise at any stage in the delivery process.

7

I get other people’s mail tucked in my stack; my neighbor has also received some of my mail. She is disabled and hung on to it for quite a while. Now she just calls me if she gets it and I can trot down the hill to retrieve it.

The only mail I know of that ever got completely lost was my tax return check. It’s a gigantic song-and-dance to get a new one issued.

8

If it makes you feel better, I had the very same thing happen to me this month - dropped my rent check into a mailbox downtown, and it ddin’t show up at the management office (less than 10 miles away) until yesterday. But it did show up.

9

[QUOTE=BobT]
Here’s the scenario: I walk to my local post office on a Sunday night and drop an envelope, properly addressed and stamped, to send from one part of suburban Los Angeles to another suburban part of L.A.

The piece of mail (which was my rent check) never made it. It didn’t get returned (or it hasn’t) and it hasn’t been delivered (since the check has never been cashed).

[/QUOTE]

It is possible that it just hasn’t been cashed yet? Maybe you could call the landlord and confirm that they didn’t get it…

10

If the only fact you have is that the check wasn’t cashed, you can’t assume the PO lost it.

Perhaps teh PO delivered it perfectly. Then the landlord’s clerk dropped the letter while carrrying it in. Or it’s sitting on somebody’s desk, or … Maybe they deposited the check & the loss occurred someplace in the banking system.

There are thousands of ways for this entire end-to-end process to fail, and only maybe 30% of them involve the PO.

11

Thanks for the info. I know now I shouldn’t be so quick to blame the Post Office. But somewhere in this world, there’s an envelope with a rent check of mine in it.

I would add that the management company also states that they’ve never received it, or at least the accounting office. So if the check did make it to its destination, it could have been lost by just someone carrying it over.

But I was told that of the 16 units in my building, three rent checks never arrived and we’re not a building full of deadbeats.

12

The post office in a neighboring town lost three different payments on me at which point I never used them again. They lost a super important packet being sent by my ex-employer to the lawer handling a case for them. The down built a new post office. During the move they found a crack or hole into which mail had been falling for years. So sometimes your not just paranoid about something bad, it’s actualy true. I couldn’t afford to keep paying fees for late payments, and how many times can you say to the same place “I mailed two weeks ago.”

13

Ex Postal worker, my 2 cents

About 5 years ago the sorting office moved to a brand spanking new office around 1 mile from the old one.

The old offices were sold to Tesco Supermarkets.

Anyways, I was one of the volunteers that removed all the old sorting frames and such.

Guess what we found under the old machinery and frames… over 250 items of mail!!!

One of which was dated 1967, the remainder from 1972 up to 1991

14

Most lost mail is the fault of the dude who mailed it; mis-addressed or poorly addressed.

It’s most likely you wrote the ZIP in such a way the Router sent it off to somewhere far away, where it’ll require special handing to get it back.

15

Another possibility, and I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often - your letter got stuck inside a magazine or bulk advertisement and went elsewhere.

My understanding is the bulk stuff like the weekly grocery store circular is transported, well, in bulk, and if your local carrier has say, 150 addresses to deliver to, they’ll receive a bale of 150 ads to either slot into each address’s sorting bin at the post office, or they’ll keep them separate as they walk the route and pop one into each mailbox as they go along.

The mystery to that concept is that last week, we received a postcard from our former vet’s office. But the card was for someone in a different city, and it was in with the ads. The next day, we received a postcard from the vet addressed to us. Seems odd that the mis-routed card got to us faster, but that’s what happened.

16

I’ve had things make cross-country tips when they originated from a place 150 miles away. The letter from my mother was better-traveled than I was! I will say, that’s quite rare and I’m genuinely stunned at how often mail gets where it’s going, and on time.

We did, years ago, have a LOT of trouble with mail never getting delivered. We were newlyweds and I had a lot of mail still coming to my maiden name. The mail delivery person serving our apartment building decided that all mail addressed to Mama Notyetzappa must have been misdirected - and took to returning it to sender. And I don’t mean one or two items total - but 3-4 pieces a month. We finally had to label our mailbox with both names. Clearly human error.

As a hijack: the most amusing messed-up mail story we have is from a few years back. My husband (Typo Knig) was donating a stack of old professional journals to some college in South America. He took the stack to a local Mailboxes’R’Us-type place because we didn’t have proper packaging. A month or two later, we started receiving old issues of this magazine in the mail, one every few days. We were baffled. Until we figured out: the package had gotten torn open somehow (by the post office? overzealous customs inspectors? someone else?) and the magazines separated. Since they all still had our home address on them… the post office redelivered them :slight_smile:

17

[QUOTE=TheLoadedDog]
Postal worker checking in…

[/QUOTE]

I was a summer sub carrier 35 years ago. Back then mail got sorted to a route, and the carrier on the route sorted it into little cubbyholes before bundling it for delivery. They never let us subs do this sort, which probably would have taken us until noon. I did lots of routes, so I would never have learned any one well.

Today, does mail get sorted to the final delivery ordering, or is there still a manual sort done?

18

I wonder where my sister’s birthday present went… I mailed it express post on September 14th, the Canada Post website (and their customer service people) indicated it was delivered on September 15th, and my sister never got it. At least (after three months of cat-and-mouse phone calls) I’m getting my money back for the contents and shipping, but still, I wish my sis had gotten that present!

19

[QUOTE=Common Tater]
Further, someone - an actual human - may have misread it yet again and delivered it to that incorrect address. .
[/QUOTE]

I know one of these guys and from his description of their systems this is pretty hard to do and they audit these guys pretty thoroughly.

Just for ignorances sake, these facilities are called Remote Encoding Centers and they do manual reads where the OCR systems fail. They never see the actual mail, an image is sent for processing, the REC recieves it, sends it to the encoder stations where a human looks at the address and makes the needed adjustment. The mail gets tagged with a barcode and will sort accurately after that in any later machine passes.

You wanna listen to bitching…every so often a bulk mailer with 700,000 pieces of mail gets his mail merge feilds out of sequence …

20

One November, my sister sent me a videotape that never arrived. We both tried contacting the post office, but had no luck finding out what had happened. Since the tape had negligible value, we didn’t pursue the issue. The following April, the tape arrived in my mail (still in its original packaging) with a note saying that it had been found in the bottom of a mailbag.