Last week I got a big white envelope from the US Postal Service. Inside the envelope was a mangled manilla envelope from my Mom. Obviously in August, she sent me something and spent $4.10 to do it (less than 200 miles) When I called her, she couldn’t remember what it was (Mom sends me many things).
So here I am with an empty package from my Mom and a letter from some postmaster saying, “This showed up in our office. It was adressed to you. Someone sent it to you a few months ago. We do not know what it was and niether do you. We fucked up. We are sorry.”
Is this supposed to make me feel better? I would have been infinitely better off if I had never known it had been sent. Fuckers.
Well, if your mom did remember what she sent she could re-send whatever the thing was. At least you know that much, you wouldn’t have if they hadn’t sent you the mangled envelope.
Maybe it was a copy of her will?
When something gets mangled in the mail it is standard practice for the Post Office to repackage whatever they can find of it and either send it to the addressee (if legible) or return it to the sender.
If you had been expecting something from your mother and it had never gotten there, you’d be looking for it and this service by the post office would have helped you discover what had happened to it. The post office isn’t forwarding you the damaged envelope to piss you off or make you feel better, they’re just doing their job.
It was a mistake. The PO makes mistakes sometimes. The system is not perfect, since it is run by human beings. And obviously whatever was lost wasn’t that big of a deal since your mother has no memory of it and never let you know to expect it.
I wish people would stop creating Pit threads about every little thing that goes wrong in their lives.
Especially since I bet the OP or someone else, if they’d not been notified and only found out later somehow that the Postal Service had just chucked the mangled, empty envelope, they would’ve had a shit fit that they hadn’t been notified and what if it was something important, blah blah blah.
Heck, they will send you an envelope that’s been mangled but has intact contents in another envelope with a “whoops, sorry” notification on it. Maybe they should stop doing that, lest someone have a heart attack over what might have been printed on the missing bit of envelope or what might’ve fallen out.
There are these big machines that grab envelopes and zip them around for postmarking and bar coding, and sorting, and every now and then one will get stuck, and bad stuff happens. Such is life.
(Yes, I’m married to a postal worker and thus just a tad defensive, but I’m equally ready to criticize the USPS when they deserve it.)
I once got a catalogue who’s cover was slightly torn and crumpled in one place. It was in a sealed clear plastic bag with a “whoops, sorry” label on it. I appreciated the sentiment, but thought it unnecessary. So I’d guess if anything, they err on the side of apologizing.
Try telling that to my former boss. He got a customer’s check in the mail and it was mangled (got chewed by a machine of some sort). You’d think the USPS had a vendetta against him. One freakin’ letter out of thousands he’d received over the years and he goes mental.
I agree with you, monstro. One mutilated package over a lifetime is not worth blowing a gasket over.
One time I sent a big box to myself (long story) and it must have come open and a lot of stuff spilled out, but the post office just taped it up like nothing happened. It was mostly school papers, but since there was nothing saying it had spilled open (ie, no apology), I thought I was going crazy, and had packed the missing stuff somewhere else. Oy.
Once, on a business trip, I was bored in a motel room in a small Texas town and I picked up the paper feminine hygiene product disposal bag in the bathroom, wrote my friend’s address on it, stuck a stamp on it and threw it in a mail box. A week or two later my friend got it in the mail, stuck inside a plastic bag, with a note from the post office apologizing for having lost the contents.
I thought it was hilarious, but I was glad that the post office was more conscientious than the government agency I was working for.
No. The Post Office will always try to complete delivery, even for damaged or partial “remains” of a mailed item. As long as the package or envelope originally bore proper postage, the only time it will be returned to sender is if the destination address is completely unrecoverable.
In the case of ripped-open or badly damaged mail, if the delivery address can’t be determined from whatever is left of the outside of the package, they will examine the contents to see if an address can be found there.
