To the Post Oriface - You're trying to piss off one of your defenders...

The BBQ Pit
1

And doing that damned well.

Normally, I believe that the USPS is one of the best run and cheapest postal systems in the world. (One need only see what happens when one’s mail is passed through a third-world post office once to get a real appreciation for the quality we get from the Postal Snail.) However, they’ve been challenging that belief lately.

First, there’s the whole mail thief I’ve had to deal with. Not really their fault, but didn’t leave me inclined towards understanding forgiveness either.

Anyways, I sent a package Priority Mail last week. To the best I can remember I handed it to the clerk at a local Post Office on Wednesday, May 17. The package was finally delivered today. May 25.

Why shouldn’t I be furious?

On top of which, anyone who’s used the Post Office’s online postage system may be aware that if one buys postage online, for a Priority Mail package, Delivery Confirmation is free.

During the past 8 days, the package never showed up on any of the Post Oriface’s tracking information. Until today. May 25.

When I went to the local Post Office where I dropped off the package, and asked what had happened, I was told that the “Free Delivery Confirmation” that the USPS offers online isn’t the same as the Delivery Confirmation that regular customers get.

For some reason, after I got that bullshit, I just smiled, and nodded, and went on my way.

And sent this letter to the Post Office via their website.

Do any of you Dopers think I’m being unreasonable?

And please, share your love for the US Post Oriface here!

2

Just checked with my husband (USPS letter carrier) who used terms like “fuckup” to refer to whatever employee caused this, and said “That’s unacceptable” a couple of times, among other exasperated comments.

Regarding the delivery confirmation thing, he says he thinks they’re trying to cover their asses - he’s not 100% sure since he’s a carrier and not a clerk, but he doesn’t think that sounds right.

Sorry you’ve apparently got idiots in your local office. Hubby thinks the online way is the best way to go, since the problems there might be deeper than a single carrier and the website submission will most likely get to where it needs to go, to get results.

3

I’ve certainly had my share of annoyances with them lately.

I recently bought something from Amazon and found, about a week later, that it was marked as delivered, but I never got it. Amazon told me to check with the local post office. I called Tuesday and the guy who answered the phone said that the carrier was out, and I’d get a call back the next day. No call the next day. On Thursday, the package was actually delivered, and I got a call a few hours later saying it had been delivered. Gee, thanks.

I can not for the life of me get our carrier to deliver our mail to us and our neighbor’s mail to them. There is another house on our lot, in the rear. Their mailbox is on the corner of our house. We have a mailslot in the door. We’ve tried labeling the box and the slot, both with the house numbers and with our names. We each get random assortments of our mail and each others.

And apparenly it’s not policy to actually check for outgoing mail. If we stick mail in the door to go out, the carrier will only bother to check if we’re getting mail that day.

4

You’re right, it’s not policy. It’s only a requirement if you’re having mail delivered that day, or if it’s a curbside route and the flag is up on the mailbox.

5

I’m going to be working in Europe this summer. I’ll be gone for 8 weeks.

Query to post office: “I’m going to be away for two months. I know you will only hold mail for thirty days, maximum, and you don’t forward mail internationally. What should I do?”

Post office: “You’ll have to have someone check your mail.”

Drakesy: “There’s no one who can do that. Could you hold it for an extra month or forward it?”

Post office: “Not unless you’re in the military.”

Drakesy: “So what happens if I just let it pile up in the box, which seems to be my only option?”

Post office: “It will be destroyed after ten days.”

So… they have a service available to military people that isn’t available to the general public. Fine. They have arbitrary limits. Fine. But perhaps they could work on a solution — I’d be delighted to rent a post-office box short-term, or something.

6

Priority Mail shouldn’t take 8 days to get anywhere in the US. I sell my overflow books at Amazon, where standard shipping is Media Mail (cheap) and it’s faster than that.

I wonder sometimes if “special” treatment (like Priority Mail and Delivery Confirmation) adds to delivery time, because of the extra handling. ??

7

Years ago, when I lived in Massachusetts, we went through a spell of getting mail that was randomly addressed to various locations, mostly in our neighborhood. We started writing “delivered to wrong address” on it and putting it back in a mailbox. That caused our mail carrier to demand that we put our names on our front door (I find it highly unlikely that this is actually a requirement to receive mail, although I’ve heard it argued). His demands were in the form of handwritten notes on the backs of our envelopes. When we did not put our names on the front door, he started writing, “Last warning - no names, no mail.” One of the envelopes he wrote this on was addressed to a house across town, that did not share a number or a street name with ours. My roommate wrote a letter to the Postmaster General, cc’d to the local Postmaster, complaining about “threats received in the mail” (the threat, he explained, was the mail carrier’s threat to stop delivering our mail - he included a photocopy of the envelope, showing the “last warning” and the incorrect address). We got a new mail carrier, and we stopped getting random mail, too.

8

I’m grrrrrrrrr’d at the USPS right now, too. I bought a game worn hockey jersey on e-bay. My PayPal receipt says the seller was paid on the 2nd. Today is the 25th. I haven’t seen the jersey yet. The seller e-mailed me that the first time she mailed it, the PO returned it to her. She didn’t say why. She mailed it again Monday before last. I want my jersey!!

9

The Canadian Postal system is much slower, so I actually like the USPS. I was shocked to receive mail from CA to MD in three days. In Canada, it’ll frequently take two weeks for a letter from major centre to major centre.

My mom and sister routinely mail packages to me from Canada. I have never had anything arrive before three weeks.

10

Ferret Herder, thanks for your kind words, and for checking with your husband for me.

I’m inclined to agree with his conclusions. Now I just hope the letter I sent does some good.

To all who’ve commented: Thanks for listening, and sharing your stories. I just had to vent, and I knew I’d find an appreciative audience here.

11

I’ve sent books via Media Mail several times, but recently they have lost two of my books. Writing to ask why is pointless, they send you around in circles saying the same stuff. I am never going to use the USPS to ship items again.

12

You’ve got to be joking, right?

I frequently have stuff shipped to me by friends in the US, and unless it gets sent Super Priority Air, it can take months for a small parcel to arrive. “Regular” air mail can take up to 3 weeks, and I’ve ordered stuff off Amazon that’s taken 6-8 weeks to show up.

I sent a small package to a friend in Arizona, and it took exactly a week to get there. I’ve mailed stuff to people in Canada and the UK, and if it takes more than a week or so to get there, something’s very wrong.

Hell, I’ve mailed stuff to NZ and had it there three days later- and vice versa.

Australia Post have earned a permanent place on my Shit List for refusing to deliver firearm parts (but it’s OK to send knives, bayonets, and swords through the mail!), but I do grudgingly grant them respect for their ability to get mail where it’s needed in a short space of time-around a week or two to the US/NZ/UK/Canada, which is pretty good!

I still think New Zealand Post ranks as one of the world’s best postal services, though- their ability to get letters and parcels to far-flung corners of the globe in not much more time than it takes to load them on a 747 heading that direction and offload them at the other end astounded me when I lived in NZ, and it astounds me today when I get letters and parcels from friends and family in NZ, postmarked only a few days before it arrived…

13

Probably govt regulation, not anything Australia Post can do much about. If you think about it, Australia Post has no vested interest in refusing to deliver the firearm parts (all they get is pissed off customers and lost revenue). They are only interested in refusing carriage of dangerous goods that could cause loss or injury to the corporation, it’s employees, or the public. Granted, firearm parts could eventually be used to injure somebody, but that’d be after Australia Post has those parts in its custody, so it wouldn’t care. AP is more genuinely concerned with stopping the shipment of things like bullets, corrosives, perishables, etc. They wouldbn’t care about gun parts, but are forced to.

14

MailBoxes Ect (Now the UPS Store?) will rent you a box. Chenage your address to that Box. At many of those private Mail Boxes places you can make arrangements for what they will do with your mail while you are gone.

15

AFAIK it’s not a Government Regulation- merely an AP policy. Whilst I don’t expect you to answer for the fuck-ups of Management, I don’t think your argument here holds water.

Gun Parts, on their own, are little bits of metal. A rifle magazine is totally useless without a gun to go in. A Bolt is of no use to anyone who doesn’t have the rifle it goes in. Triggers are just curved bits of metal until attached to the mechanism.

Yet a knife or bayonet could conceivably stab someone during processing or delivery (if improperly packed and the blade cuts through the parcel, for example), bbut Australia Post is quite happy to carry bayonets and knives- but not a magazine for a rifle made 70 years ago?

I can totally understand a policy against shipping Dangerous Goods, or even entire firearms (Which, if they go missing, could cause a lot of problems!) but I honestly can’t see what’s gained by saying “We’re not shipping ANYTHING which might even be tangentially related to making a firearm work” except pissing off every licenced gun owner in the country- which, as you’ve said yourself, does not make good business sense.

The QLD Weapons Act 1990 specifically says it’s OK to send guns and parts thereof by post, and I’m pretty sure every state except WA (they’re weird over there!) has similar clauses. NSW definitely does, and I’m 99% sure VIC does as well- and I’d be very surprised if SA and the NT don’t either…

16

Nope. Compared to say, the Jamaican Post Office, where 25% wastage is considered normal by the people I spoke with on the island; nor to, say, the British Post Office which never fails to mangle anything of mine that passes through their hands - And charges more than the USPS; nor to, say, Post Canada which seems to hire only retired, arthritic snails for mail delivery - it should not take over a week for mail to go from Rochester, NY to Toronto, ON - and they charge more for a first class letter, too.

The USPS postal snail is far from perfect, but it’s still one of the better ones. I don’t claim it’s the best, though - so you can keep NZ post in the top spot for all I’d argue. :wink:

17

I always get pissed at the post office that delivers mail to my office. They’re a bunch of lazy-asses. First, they’ll constantly deliver mail that doesn’t belong to us and when we mark “not at this address” and put it back in the box, they re-deliver it to us!. Unbelievable!

One time, I got a notification in our box that they tried to deliver certified mail but no one was there to recieve it and that it would be at the post office dated the previous day. Now, this happened when co-worker was glued to her desk at the front of the office, watching the mailman walk right past our door both that day and the previous day. He never even tried to deliver it! So I went to the post office later that afternoon and suprise suprise, it wasn’t there. The carrier hadn’t made it back from his rounds yet! But, the notice was dated the previous day. Curious! Then the clerk had the nerve to give me attitude, saying that she would contact me when the package made it back to the office as a one time courtesy.

I felt truly honored. :rolleyes:

18

Just wanted to add regarding putting your name on your mailbox - this is a good idea, regardless, but especially good if you live in an apartment. I suspect many people have no idea if they have a regular carrier assigned to their route, or if their route is unassigned and is thus delivered by the randomly picked carrier of the day, or if perhaps the part of the route they live on is considered “bad” (for any number of reasons) and thus handed off to someone else to cover it as often as the carrier can manage. Some carriers do a better job than others of keeping their cases up to date, and so a substitute might have no idea what names are valid for what house.

Yeah, so some sucky carrier in this thread was insisting on it, but if you do it, he doesn’t have any excuse for screwing up repeatedly.*

My husband had a customer move onto his route who said she submitted a change of address card with the post office, but she hadn’t received any mail at her address, and the mail was still being sent to her old address. (This is another reason why changing your address directly with correspondants is a good idea, too.) The only reason he knew this new customer had moved in was that she was one of his sisters - who had just moved out of the two-flat that she rented with us, so the old address was our place. Fortunately both of these routes are out of the same office, so he was able to tell our letter carrier about the problem, and I forget if the card was eventually processed or if she had to submit a new one. If her letter carrier didn’t happen to be her brother, he would have never known there was a tenant receiving mail there.

Epimetheus, Media Mail sucks, basically. It’s super-low priority, treated very poorly, and you definitely get what you pay for here. Amazon typically sends their free shipping packages via Media Mail, and I’ve tracked them to the post office distribution center and watched them idle there for a week or more before being shipped out to the local post office. It basically means “sort and process this if you have nothing better to do,” in my experience.

Oh, and I got a package to Tripler in Afghanistan via US Global Priority in only a week and a half. :smiley: I think the package he sent back took that long or maybe 2 weeks?

  • The occasional misdelivered piece of mail should be expected. Besides the fact that a letter carrier can sort and deliver hundreds or thousands of pieces of mail in a day, they are also given “DPS” mail that is computer sorted ahead of time. Carriers are told they cannot sort this mail themselves, but must deliver it as it is provided to them. Naturally, errors can occur in computer sorted mail too, and carriers will try to catch this on the street but can’t always manage to.
19

My best (worst) mail delivery story involves a package I was going to mail from New Jersey to London on Wednesday, September 12, 2001. I finally got it mailed a week later on Wednesday, September 19, 2001.

It got to London on January 23, 2002.

20

What if I have a reason for not wanting to display to the world where I live? Does that mean that the mailman should be able to arbitrarily threaten to stop delivering my mail? (We weren’t in an apartment at the time, not that I can see why it matters.)

We were perfectly happy to accept any mail addressed to our street address without complaint. Mail put through our slot not addressed to our street address went back in a mailbox, with a small note explaining why already-postmarked mail was back in the system. What’s so obnoxious about that?