Share your bad post office experiences!

Greetings from the world's WORST post office, conveniently located in the town I live in!

Right now, I'm embroiled yet AGAIN in their shining incompetence.  I bought an expensive item from eBay, which the seller sent out the same day; it arrived at the p.o. Monday.  It's really out of my way, but I have to sign for it, so I went online for redelivery for Saturday, when I'd be home. Meanwhile, DH said he had to go there after work to mail something, & offered to pick it up for me.  Tonight was the night.  They can't find it.  I have confirmation by email that it is there, not out for delivery. They said they'd check the returning mail van, & call us tonight. Never did.

All of the following happened within a 6-month period recently:

1.  Same as above for another package; they did eventually find it--after mixing up 2 tracking #s on 2 of my packages.

2.  Three items in 2 weeks, clearly marked with my correct address were returned to the sender: "Undeliverable to this address". I had to re-pay postage.

3.   An item from India:  they left a 1st notice card on my door, but skipped to #3  the next day, before I could arrange for delivery (final notice, then the item gets returned to sender). Called the same manager whom I've spoken to in each of these citations, BTW.  "I can't find it--oh, wait a minute--I think it's been returned to the sender."  It wasn't, thankfully--but it was in that bin for the next day.

4.  I requested redelivery for yet another parcel; sat around all Saturday morning, waiting for the blasted thing, only to find out it was never on the mail truck. (Happened twice within a month.)

5.  The shoes saga: these were in a thin padded envelope. I was home sick that day, laying on the sofa, so I saw the mailman at the box, & couldn't understand what he was doing for 2-3 minutes at the box. The only mail was that envelope & a flyer. How did he not see the completely ripped open end of the envelope, which had nothing in it? Someone at the p.o. had to have stolen my shoes. Hope the employee is a size 5. The eBay seller didn't do it--she's someone I've dealt with before and since--very honest. I sometimes think the mailman has a bit of a thing for me; I wonder if he took my shoes for some creepy sexual reason. Someone TORE that envelope open; it didn't come unsealed by itself.

6.  This guy repeatedly gives us the wrong mail; and I often see him backing the truck up to various mailboxes after he left them, in order to put the correct mail in them.

7.  Various other mess-ups in that time period--just can't remember the details.

And to think, in some towns, it's still traditional to tip the mail person at Christmas, or leave them cookies. Right.

What are your post office nightmares? Please share!

I don't have any, and, after reading yours, I'm very grateful!

Oh where to start?? Well, no better place than Once upon a time, we had a great post office. The post office lady (very small, very rural area) would happily hold mail for anyone, no questions asked. She knew who lived in the area and who didn't. No problem. Then The Nice Post Office Lady retired to be replaced by Ninny. Ninny hated farmers, She was so bad that she kicked those of us who came in smelling of livestock and grain dust out of the store and told us we couldnt pick up our mail of groceries with a tractor (think winter, 6' of snow) and if anyone went on vacation, she would send their mail back to Canada Post to be returned to sender....forever after that first indiscretion of asking for a vacation hold.

Popular opinion drove Ninny away and she was replaced by Stoner Loser Idiot. Stoner, after a few weeks on the job had decided it was too much work. Quit selling stamps, quit doing money orders, refused to weigh parcels, and very often, sent parcels sent to the locals back in two days (Canada Post's guidelines are 10 days city, up to 30 rural). She then decided that sorting the mail was too much work and just stuffed things willy nilly into boxes, not even bothering to read the name on either box or envelope. As her duties got more onerous, she finally resorted to opening the mail bag, and sending most of the stuff back as undeliverable and playing games with parcels. Faced bundles from the power, gas and phone company were sent back to sender with a sticky note saying not for here; this only happened with large batch mailings rather than a few random bills out of sync with the rest of the community. She also sent back grain cheques right in keeping with Ninny that preceeded her, much to the annoyance of farmers - more paperwork and waiting for money.

A month ago, Canada Post turfed her @$$ out and moved the boxes to the village office and it seems that all are happy now. Mail is sorted, people get their parcels, and now we don't have to drive 30 miles for stamps. .The post office people had a real mess to contend with - unsorted bundles of mail, parcels strewn all over the store, and they had to find all this stuff in a couple thousand sq ft of shelving and hidey holes.  

Mine has a few policies I wonder about but mainly

1-you will get a final notice and no 1st or 2nd.  You also can not leave the card in box like I have done in every town before this one. 

2-"frozen"  "keep out of sun" "this end up" mean nothing.  Thankfully cake still tastes fine upside down and melted and stuck in the fridge.

3- One of the subs likes to not knock at the door and insert said final notice.  I thought he was knocking real low maybe till one day I was about to check mail and saw him walk up and put mail in box and walk away within seconds.

Oh my guy from few years ago was priceless.

We lived on a MAIN road and not alot of room to get mail as there was a bush on property line so cars about to pass could not see you.  SOOOOOO this clever one didn't feel like walking the 25 or so feet and stuffed a BLANKET in the darn box one day.  We had to wait until night tim to wrangle it free.  It was a queen size and our mail.  After that the mailbox was a bit loose.  NO idea why he thought it would be easier then to walk up as it was alot safer to pull off to the gravel driveway right next to box then to stay in that lane-no way that thing went in easy.

Aww . I'm sorry you guys have bad Post Office experiences. I work for USPS. We do our best with delivering thousands of mailpieces every day with crummy management and chronic understaffing. Well, I suppose some individual employees may be lazy or bad, but almost everyone I know does their best under the circumstances.

Well that sounds really awful and you have a bunch of incompetent people working there! But I have to say I miss the U.S. Postal Service, overall they are amazing. They even deliver on Saturdays and will pick up stamped mail if you leave it on your mailbox <- those things don't happen here! And in the U.S., the mail carrier comes through the neighborhood every single day; we're lucky if we get mail 3 times a week, usually it's once or twice. Maybe it's because we are on a dead-end street but still you'd think there's somebody on the street with mail, but nobody comes by... On weeks with a holiday, usually no mail is delivered that week (have lived in this same house for 10 years). Letters from the U.S. take forever; my sister lives just across the strait in Washington state and she has to allow 2 to 3 weeks for a letter or document to get from her to me. A letter sent at the same time from Washington state is delivered in Texas within 2 days, I know it has customs to go through but come on.

Wow that is so amazing to think SwampWitch!  My mom sends something and I get it in less then 24 hours.

I do have to say most of the time all comes just fine-including international orders for myself and the cats.  Even damaged packages arrive with all contents and a taped box/envelope.  I like getting the mail daily especially with my ebay purchases of coupons/supplies. 

*knock on wood* Our postmaster is a sweetie. We're a very small, rural town and he knows everybody pretty much by their first names. Rick went into the post office a while back to buy stamps and he said, "Hey, Rick, want your mail while you're here?"

And our mail carrier is a trooper. When we order something, he won't try to stuff it in the mailbox. He'll come up the driveway and put everything on the front stoop at the door. If it's something small, he'll stick it between the storm door and our front door. And when it's raining, he always has the items in a nice trash bag, so they don't get wet.

So during the holidays, I always take cookies to the post office. And sometimes when I've done a lot of baking, I'll drop some cookies off.....just because. Our postmaster is diabetic, so he puts the cookies out for people to munch on while they're waiting in line for service. And we always give a Christmas bonus and cookies to our carrier.

OTOH, don't get me started on our newspaper carrier!!

Willowy said:

Aww

. I'm sorry you guys have bad Post Office experiences. I work for USPS. We do our best with delivering thousands of mailpieces every day with crummy management and chronic understaffing. Well, I suppose some individual employees may be lazy or bad, but almost everyone I know does their best under the circumstances.

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Willowy, I hope I didn't offend you! I apologise! I didn't know you worked for the USPS.  Most of the time, even at my P.O., things are great, and I will say that the front-end staff at the windows are very pleasant and helpful.  However, I just don't know what the deal is with my P.O. about parcels. When I complain to the manager, she's pleasant enough, but I've never once gotten an apology for all of the trouble, which I reminded her about.  It must be something to do with the parcels/packages end of things. Letters, bills, and ads arrive just fine.  Stealing is unacceptable, IMHO. (Those shoes I mentioned.)

I've a few questions, would you mind answering them?:

 1.  In the case of the shoes envelope, what is the carrier required to do?  I don't understand why they'd knowingly put an empty parcel envelope, that is obviously torn open, in the mail box.

2.  In the case of my current parcel:  when a piece is returned for redelivery, don't they file them in some way that would enable them to find it easily for when the customer comes to pick it up/or when they put it back on the truck for the new redelivery date?  Whenever I go to pick one up, there seems to be mass confusion, and I often get told they can't find it.  I'd think they would have some system, be it alphabetical or by the parcel #, or zip code, etc. I'm a library cataloger, so mabye it's just me--I tend to categorize and sort things in my mind that way!

3.  if it turns out that they lost my parcel, how are they responsible for paying for it?  I bought it through eBay; I'm not sure if it's insured--I don't worry much about that, as Paypal handles replacing things now, and I've had a lot of luck with them.  I know the USPS will try to tell me they can't do anything if it's not insured, but I have written proof that arrived at their P.O. (online & email tracking messages), and I still have the From 3849, which, if I had gotten the parcel, would've had to have been signed, and surrendered to them.

Thank you! And thank you for doing your job so well!

I would say generally the carriers do pretty well.  Oh, I've seen incompetents.  I used to deliver bulk mail to the Dallas bulk mail center every Thursday and Saturday morning.  Sometimes it was fine.  Sometimes it was like everyone had taken a vote to do nothing that day.

We have some basic problems with our postal system.  It starts with management that is quasi-government, so they don't have much incentive to do well, just to stay out of big trouble.  Add in the postal unions that purposely sow dissension between management and workers (Unions stay in business not by making workers happy, but by making them unhappy; happy workers might not join or stay in the union.), and also protect themselves first and incompetent workers second, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Of course, the biggest problem is that the overall business model just doesn't work any more in this age of non-paper communication.  The trucking company I now work for works almost entirely on paper; drivers fax in their paperwork, and then, when they get confirmation a few days later, toss it out.  Everything.  Receipts.  Bills of lading.  Log books.  Everything.
 

I have had my share of beefs with the Post Office.  We had one carrier that mis-delivered the neighbors mail to me 2-3 times a week.  When I confronted her, she said "Oh, the first name is the same so I thought it was for you"  5 complaints to the Postmaster in town and she is no longer with the PO.  The worst was when a carrier left a missed delivery notice in my box, signed that she had delivered it and took the package with her.  It was meds from the VA, that after 4 calls to the PO got delivered 3 days later.

The only somewhat bad experience I had was when I paid $10 to send a box of chocolates to my grandma for Christmas and I paid for 2-3 day delivery and it took over 2 weeks. It wasn't that big of a deal though, they refunded my $10. My grandma just had a late Christmas gift that year.

Our post office here is pretty good. I had to pick up an item that my husband ordered online and went in, got the item and left in less than a minute. Our mail carrier is really nice. She always says hi to everyone and she carries dog treats in her pocket. My dogs like to bark at her and she just smiles and throws them a treat.

I don't really have any bad post office/delivery experiences. I think our post office does a rather good job, considering the amount of mail that it has to process each day.

I do recall going to a local post office located inside a pharmacy near where I used to work though and having to wait nearly 1/2 hour to buy 4 stamps!! The problem?  The elderly lady in front of me was sending out a pile of cards or something, and needed the lone clerk to help her address the envelopes and put stamps on them all!  There wan't that many, but it took time because the woman had to open each envelope, pull out the card to read who the card was for, put it back in the envelope, consult her list and then give the clerk the proper name/address to put on the envelope.  Drove me freaking mad!!  LOL

MargeCat said:

Willowy, I hope I didn't offend you! I apologise! I didn't know you worked for the USPS.  Most of the time, even at my P.O., things are great, and I will say that the front-end staff at the windows are very pleasant and helpful.  However, I just don't know what the deal is with my P.O. about parcels. When I complain to the manager, she's pleasant enough, but I've never once gotten an apology for all of the trouble, which I reminded her about.  It must be something to do with the parcels/packages end of things. Letters, bills, and ads arrive just fine.  Stealing is unacceptable, IMHO. (Those shoes I mentioned.)

I've a few questions, would you mind answering them?:
 1.  In the case of the shoes envelope, what is the carrier required to do?  I don't understand why they'd knowingly put an empty parcel envelope, that is obviously torn open, in the mail box.

2.  In the case of my current parcel:  when a piece is returned for redelivery, don't they file them in some way that would enable them to find it easily for when the customer comes to pick it up/or when they put it back on the truck for the new redelivery date?  Whenever I go to pick one up, there seems to be mass confusion, and I often get told they can't find it.  I'd think they would have some system, be it alphabetical or by the parcel #, or zip code, etc. I'm a library cataloger, so mabye it's just me--I tend to categorize and sort things in my mind that way!

3.  if it turns out that they lost my parcel, how are they responsible for paying for it?  I bought it through eBay; I'm not sure if it's insured--I don't worry much about that, as Paypal handles replacing things now, and I've had a lot of luck with them.  I know the USPS will try to tell me they can't do anything if it's not insured, but I have written proof that arrived at their P.O. (online & email tracking messages), and I still have the From 3849, which, if I had gotten the parcel, would've had to have been signed, and surrendered to them.

Thank you! And thank you for doing your job so well!

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All righty! :lol3:. Hmm. . .

1.) There's nothing we CAN do really. The envelope comes to us ripped and empty, we don't have any idea what used to be in it or what happened to it, or even if anything WAS in it to begin with. We have to deliver everything with an address and postage on it no matter what. . .so all we can do is deliver the empty envelope . We keep stickers around saying "arrived damaged at __ PO", but that's not very helpful. I have to say that very few employees would risk their pension by stealing a pair of shoes, so more likely the parcel was damaged in the sorting machines and the shoes fell out there. There is a "found loose in mail" department, so next time a package arrives without contents ask the postmaster to put a report in to them. You need to know specifics about the item, though (exactly what brand, size, color, etc.).

2.) They really SHOULD have some kind of system, LOL. Now and then someone will set something somewhere it shouldn't be and everything falls apart, but if it happens on a regular basis they obviously have some organization issues.

3.) If the sender didn't insure it with us, well. . .:dk:. Most companies carry their own insurance and so you have to go through them. eBay sellers rarely get Postal insurance because PayPal takes care of that. Those not covered by private insurance or PayPal should get Postal insurance for anything that's important.



Hehe, I have my "mail math" speech I always give to friends and family who complain about misdeliveries: every carrier gets at least 1000 pieces of mail every day. And that's a small route; a normal-sized route probably averages about 2-3 thousand, a high-density route will have even more. If they maintain a 99% accuracy rate (which is pretty good, ithink), that still means that 10-30 mailpieces will be misdelivered every day. It's pretty rare that a carrier has that many misthrows (newbies and subs, maybe), so if he's really good we'll say a 99.9% accuracy rate (statistically impossible to be better than that!), but that still means 1-3 misdelivered pieces every day. And if it's your mail that gets misdelivered, yeah, that stinks. But it's not possible for humans to be 100% accurate all the time. And at least your mail carrier will be back the next day to take the misdelivered mail back. . .the UPS guy delivered a package that wasn't mine (same house number, 2 blocks over), and other than throwing it on their porch myself (which I did), I didn't know what to do with it!

At our old apartment our mail person was horrible! They'd never leave the slip if we missed the delivery, which we always did because they didn't bother to buzz and let us know it was there. We always had to track our packages online, then call the post office when it said they had been sent there and ask if it was there. Thankfully, the post office knew that that particular carrier never left the notices so they would give it to us as long as we had ID. Normally, you have to have the card to pick up a parcel.

The only complaint I have about our postal system where I live now is that the post office where my packages are sent is a good 20 minute walk from where I live, or a 5 minute drive, but you have to pay for parking. There are about 3 post offices closer to where I live than that one, but because of my "zone" that's where my packages go.

The PO here in my current home town is excellent. I live on the second floor of an apartment with a small mailbox. No matter how large or how heavy the item is I've ordered, it's always in front of my door, carried up the fight of stairs for me.

I usually get mail earlier than expected when shipped/sent too. When I order a package off amazon, they say 5-7 days, I usually get it in 3. Snail mail usually within a day or so.

Willowy said:

All righty!

. Hmm. . .
1.) There's nothing we CAN do really. The envelope comes to us ripped and empty, we don't have any idea what used to be in it or what happened to it, or even if anything WAS in it to begin with. We have to deliver everything with an address and postage on it no matter what. . .so all we can do is deliver the empty envelope

. We keep stickers around saying "arrived damaged at __ PO", but that's not very helpful. I have to say that very few employees would risk their pension by stealing a pair of shoes, so more likely the parcel was damaged in the sorting machines and the shoes fell out there. There is a "found loose in mail" department, so next time a package arrives without contents ask the postmaster to put a report in to them. You need to know specifics about the item, though (exactly what brand, size, color, etc.).
2.) They really SHOULD have some kind of system, LOL. Now and then someone will set something somewhere it shouldn't be and everything falls apart, but if it happens on a regular basis they obviously have some organization issues.
3.) If the sender didn't insure it with us, well. . .

. Most companies carry their own insurance and so you have to go through them. eBay sellers rarely get Postal insurance because PayPal takes care of that. Those not covered by private insurance or PayPal should get Postal insurance for anything that's important.
Hehe, I have my "mail math" speech I always give to friends and family who complain about misdeliveries: every carrier gets at least 1000 pieces of mail every day. And that's a small route; a normal-sized route probably averages about 2-3 thousand, a high-density route will have even more. If they maintain a 99% accuracy rate (which is pretty good, ithink), that still means that 10-30 mailpieces will be misdelivered every day. It's pretty rare that a carrier has that many misthrows (newbies and subs, maybe), so if he's really good we'll say a 99.9% accuracy rate (statistically impossible to be better than that!), but that still means 1-3 misdelivered pieces every day. And if it's your mail that gets misdelivered, yeah, that stinks. But it's not possible for humans to be 100% accurate all the time. And at least your mail carrier will be back the next day to take the misdelivered mail back. . .the UPS guy delivered a package that wasn't mine (same house number, 2 blocks over), and other than throwing it on their porch myself (which I did), I didn't know what to do with it!

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That was said very well! Thank you! (From a fellow mail carrier)

I don't have many complaints with them. I have a HUGE issue with my current mail carrier. Yes, we have complained and things have to be real bad for me to do that because as our USPS postal employees have said above, everyone has a bad day and everyone makes mistakes. This was consistent issues with him, such as scanning my packages as delivered and not delivering them for a few days, delivering the wrong mail to my house (and my mail to the neighbors, and opening the breezeway door and walking into my house!!! I haven't seen him in about a month though. We have had a bunch of different carriers in that time and no issue with any of them.

AbbysMom said:

I don't have many complaints with them. I have a HUGE issue with my current mail carrier. Yes, we have complained and things have to be real bad for me to do that because as our USPS postal employees have said above, everyone has a bad day and everyone makes mistakes. This was consistent issues with him, such as scanning my packages as delivered and not delivering them for a few days, delivering the wrong mail to my house (and my mail to the neighbors, and opening the breezeway door and walking into my house!!! I haven't seen him in about a month though. We have had a bunch of different carriers in that time and no issue with any of them.

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We are not allowed to open screen doors and leave parcels at my PO. Also we are not "usually" allowed to open gates to deliver parcels (only if we have prior permission from the home owner.) These reasons include dog danger and a complaint from someone in our District taht a door was damaged when a carrier left a parcel between the doors and it didn't shut properly and the wind caught&damaged the door. I ALWAYS leave a notice at the door IF no one answers so it can't be said that "The carrier never came to the door". Heard that more times than I care to dispute. Can't tell you how many times I've rang, knocked, heard the TV...Kids...people talking. Yet no-one comes to the door. I'll bang twice but hey, I get paid on evaluated time and other people are waiting for their mail, too. Sorry got going there!