O Post Office!

[Tabris]

My dear local Postal workers:

I really do like you guys. Few to none of my items have gone missing in the last few years, and you're always so friendly about things, like when my friends mail me a package the shape and weight of a rhinoceros and I apologize and you say it's no problem, smiling as if it really isn't.

And Christmas cards--thousands of them, millions of them, coming to this city--many to my very own house! All for thirty-nine cents apiece! It's a steal. You certainly can't fly across the country for thirty-nine cents, and yet my friends have sent me good wishes for that paltry sum.

Having said that, though, I have one teensie request. My friend Barbara's Christmas card, although it did arrive, took ten days to get here from only 200 miles away--and when it arrived, it had tire tracks on the envelope.

I know a stamped letter is cheap, but that doesn't mean you should drive over it.

Thank you so much for your attention, and much love during this hectic Christmas season.

Yours affectionately,
Tabris

[IndianInlaw]

Tabris, does your friend Barbara live in a city that begins with the letters "Fort" and end in "Lauderdale"?

Just askin

[Reika]

Tabris, does your friend Barbara live in a city that begins with the letters "Fort" and end in "Lauderdale"?

Just askin

I'm wondering if there's something about that area since the bottled water company I was with had problems with the delivery men actually doing deliveries on time.

[Alida]

Where I used to work, we laughed about the mail.  Every so often we would get mail with footprints on them!  At least brush it off

[Tabris]

The letter in question came from New York. I've had things arrive mangled beyond belief from many different cities, though.

An ebay seller shipped me something on December 5th. It arrived yesterday. On Saturday when it still hadn't arrived, I'd emailed him and asked how it was packaged, etc. He said it had gone parcel post and I replied, "Then we have at least ten more days before I have any reason to panic." **sigh**  Our mail sorters are great, but sometimes they just fail to get to Parcel Post.

Hey, at least we can laugh about it.

[T'Mar of Vulcan]

The letter in question came from New York. I've had things arrive mangled beyond belief from many different cities, though.

At least your stuff actually *arrives*. Whenever I try to send a parcel to or from the U.K., it never arrives. I don't know why the U.K. only, because I've sent stuff to and from the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand and it's all been fine. But somewhere between Johannesburg and the U.K. there's a black hole where parcels just disappear...

[hobish]

The letter in question came from New York. I've had things arrive mangled beyond belief from many different cities, though.

At least your stuff actually *arrives*. Whenever I try to send a parcel to or from the U.K., it never arrives. I don't know why the U.K. only, because I've sent stuff to and from the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand and it's all been fine. But somewhere between Johannesburg and the U.K. there's a black hole where parcels just disappear...

I have had the same issues trying to mail things to Nuku'Alofa in Tonga. One package was even re-routed back to me 3 weeks after i had sent it.

[Sterling]

Ok I personally love my postman.  I bake cookies for him for Christmas.  Of course that is because it is a rural delivery and instead of just leaving things on the mailbox if it is a package he turns up my driveway and deals with my dogs to place it safely on my porch (in a plastic bag if it even looks like it might rain) and usually leaves me a happy note.

however FedEx lost my business a while back when I ordered something from a catalog and they delivered it in the rain with no plastic and placed in on the ground.  The yleft no notice that they had left a package and it wasn't until I can home that I found shredded silk pjs all over my wet yard.  I called them and asked why they didn't put it on my porch and they said they left in by my mailbox and don't have to go through the trouble of going up to a house.  I was kind of mad about that.

[Clara Bow]

Here in my tiny little town (think a mix of Peyton Place and HeeHaw) the only requirements to work in our post office are blindness and developmental impairment, preferably cataclysmic in nature. Our post office is the slowest place in the whole world, and they cannot find their tail with both hands. I love our postmaster, but he's only one man and there's only so much he can do with the incompentents that he is given....

[freakyfemme]

The porter's office at my school works at an absolutely glacial pace.  If my mom mails me something and says it'll be there in a week, it's usually more like a week and a half or two weeks.  Also, in second year, when one of my poems was published in Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul IV (heavily edited, unfortunately), the publishers supposedly mailed me my free autographed copy of the book in mid-September, and it hadn't arrived by the time I'd left for Christmas break in mid-December.

[thebadchemist]

Have y'all had to go to the PO lately? The lines at my local one are INSANE!!!! However, my new neighborhood PO is far friendlier than my former PO. That PO was a brand-new facility and they all acted like we greatly troubled them by mailing packages. This PO was a lot older (re: no automated system... sob!), but the people are great. I brought in a package notice (thank goodness the postman didn't just leave it... it wouldn't be there by the end of the day) and even though it was before the pickup time of 10:30, the very, very helpful clerk went and found it anyway.

I don't like FedEx too much. At work, we deal with all the big couriers and the FedEx delivery guys are all grumpy and mean. One of them was banned from our facility after he yelled at one of the directors for no reason. There's one deliveryperson who's very nice, but she handles the overnight-before-10am stuff, so we rarely see her and she doesn't do pickups. However, I LOVE our UPS driver. He's the best ever! He even came back without a formal pickup request. He delivered something and noticed that I was prepping a shipment. Lo and behold, I was sidetracked for the rest of the day and didn't finish it. He comes back in the afternoon and says that he didn't notice a pickup request, but he thought he should stop by. He even waited while I ran around throwing stuff into the package to complete it. I'm going to miss him when we move down the bloody street. Just one block! But it's to a different zip code and it's not part of his route. Shucks!

[Chartreuse]

My only complaint is that if we ever have anything that we have to sign for, the postal workers refuse to get out of the jeep and walk to the door to have us sign for it.  Instead we get the "we attempted to deliver, please go to the post office" notice left in our mailbox.  We live on a 1/2 acre lot in the middle of a subdivision.  It's not like it's that difficult to just come up and knock.  They have no problems with doing that for packages, but apparently signing for confirmed mail is something they just won't do. 

[Cupcake Fiend]

I used to work for a company that did a large part of their selling through their catalog.  As a customer service rep one of my many duties was tracking missing shipments.

There were so many examples of deliveries gone wrong, but I think the worst was the one where the tracking receipt came in that the driver had left the package in "a bin in the building lobby".  This was a HUGE apartment building in a big city.  When I told the customer what the tracking said she siad "but the only bins in the lobby are the trash cans."  Yep.  The driver threw the package in the trash, and marked it delivered.  Sigh.