It isn't because we hate the Postal Service that it's going under, but surely that can't help

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"Neither rain nor hail nor sleet nor snow nor heat of day nor dark of night shall keep this carrier from the swift completion of his appointed rounds."

-- William Kendall's 1876 adaptation of Herodotus for the frieze of New York City's General Post Office

by Ken

It appears then, that this inspiring declaration was never actually an official postal motto. Nowadays if the U.S. Postal Service were casting about for a motto, I might suggest:

"Gimme a break, we deliver lotsa stuff, a really lotsa."

Warnings come faster and furiouser of the USPS's dire financial straits. While it doesn't seem possible that the Postal Service will actually go under, the warnings come accompanied by gruesome forecasts of the cutbacks that may be in store, only starting with the long-threatened reduction to five-day delivery.

Now I realize that the USPS's woes are principally attributable to the rise of alternate delivery services for packages and now the widespread replacement of mail with e-mail. Nothing is going to reverse those trends. However, I have to believe that one reason people have been so quick to jump at alternatives is the ever-increasingly lousy service and abusive treatment we get from the Postal Service. These are traits that commonly develop in monopoly situations. Unfortunately, they're terrible traits to have if you should lose your monopoly.

Out of sheer frustration, and for no other reason, I'm going to share with you a letter I wrote a couple of days ago and then decided against mailing, on the ground that WTF is the point?

Postmaster
New York, NY 10005

To whom it may concern:

I realize it’s pointless, but I just want to get a formal protest on the record. I have been waiting patiently for weeks for this CD, and only just thought to find out whether the shipper had tracking information, and sure enough it was with the shipping notice, and now I see that you’re pretending it was delivered on March 5.

Let the record show that this is not true.

Oh, maybe it was delivered somewhere, but not to where it was addressed:

[mailing address, at 20 Broad Street in zip code 10005]

I don’t know whether it was misdelivered or stolen, and I don’t much care, since either way I’m screwed. Luckily I’m only out $5.42, but I hate being cheated and then lied to—for the first time since we moved downtown. When my office was in the Penn Station area, it happened often enough—including a couple of very expensive shipments—that I stopped allowing anyone to send me anything via the USPS. Of course from the address, date, and time of delivery, the supervisors surely could have found out in a matter of minutes who made the imaginary deliveries, but naturally nobody could find out anything, so sorry! (Then, on the largest shipment, which was insured, the USPS managed to drag out the payment process for months.)

In case you folks were wondering why people work so hard to avoid using the USPS, and in fact have come to hate it, maybe this will help you understand.

Sincerely,

Oh, I'll probably write a shorter version, maybe a few sentences, just to get on the record that their claimed "delivery" is bogus. Has there ever been a bigger scam that the USPS's bogus "delivery confirmation"?

As I discovered when my office was still in Midtown -- in the very postal domain, in fact, of the General Post Office, which bears the famous inscription above -- it doesn't mean a thing. Maybe it means that the thing was delivered somewhere, or maybe it doesn't even mean that. All it really means is that, presumably, at some point the carrier scanned the bar code on the item and declared it "delivered."

I can't imagine I'm the only one in the delivery-challenged situation of having no one at home to receive packages, and therefore choosing on occasion to have stuff delivered to my office. Unfortunately for me, the delivery challenges I face at home and at work are different, and don't mesh well.

At home, if the thing fits in my mailbox, I'm usually okay, or as okay as any of us get with the delivery crapshoot that the Postal Service has become. If it doesn't fit in the mailbox, the theory is that a delivery slip is left, and you pick it up at the post office. There are only two problems (only two? these days doesn't that qualify as "virtually problem-free?):

(1) Beyond the inconvenience, which I suppose I deserve for the thoughtlessness of not having someone at home to receive the delivery in the first place, there's the fact that my post office closes at 5, I assume to ensure that no day-shift working person has a shot at getting there, even if they leave work a little early. In my case, since my office is open till 6:00, and it takes me more than an hour to get home, if you do the math, it's not even close. (They do open at 8am, but I'm supposed to be at my desk at 9, and again it takes me more than an hour to get there.) Well, they are open Saturday morning, and I've done my share of Saturday pickups. However --

(2) The delivery-slip-leaving system is, shall we say, imperfect. Sometimes you get 'em, sometimes you don't. In my building, not infrequently you'll find, on the ledge above the mailboxes where wrongly delivered and undeliverable mail is left, delivery slips for addresses other than our building. It isn't even possible to perform an errand of mercy to physically take the slip and try to get it to the ledge over the mailboxes in the correct building (we have a sort of "twin" building next door, and stuff for one is often delivered to the other), because virtually all Manhattan apartment-building lobbies are generally accessible only to people with keys. But I've had so many cases of receiving no delivery slip that I have to believe they're often simply not left.

Once, in fact, after waiting patiently for weeks for a single CD to be delivered (if you sound the alarm too soon, the sender is likely to tell you that it could still be on the way, since after all it can take up to . . . I don't know, a few years?), I contacted the sender, who turned out to have paid for delivery confirmation -- without bothering to include the tracking number in the shipping confirmation -- and so was able to find out online that it was at my post office and was due to be returned the next day following three delivery attempts with notices left.

Now this is so preposterous that I don't know where to begin. I don't believe that any post office in New York has attempted more than one delivery on an item in maybe 30 years. Oh, once upon a time we did have such a thing as "1ST NOTICE" and "2ND NOTICE" and "FINAL NOTICE," but I only know about that because of my extremely advance edge.

Indeed there was a period a few years ago when delivery notices stopped being left at all, at least on a selective basis. I discoverd only after the fact that at least three items had been returned to the sender without my knowing that delivery had ever been attempted. The senders were singularly unsympathetic, perhaps because on media mail the USPS charges for the return delivery. (Is that what this was about? Drumming up a little extra business by charging twice to get the package right back where it started?)

I wrote an angry letter similar to the one above to my post office, and actually got a response -- shocked, of course, at the suggestion that such a thing could happen, but promising to watch my mail for some specified period. Great! Just what I needed was unnamed postal authorities "watching" my mail. In any case, by then I had made it a practice not to have anything that wouldn't fit in my mailbox delivered to me at home.

Which brings me to the problem of getting stuff at the office. The problem isn't at my office. As far as I know, if the carrier gets it to our office, the item is gotten to me. But I learned that getting a small package to a Manhattan office-building address is a high-risk venture. There is, apparently, a serious pilferage problem somewhere (somewheres?) in the delivery chain. So for a while I tried having the really small stuff, which seemed ripe for plucking, mailed to my home, on the above theory that if it fits in my mailbox, I might get it. I thought I was okay with large packages, though.

And then not one, not two, but three packages went astray. By now I had wised up to tracking numbers, and was shocked to find that delivery was claimed on all three. In fact, I more or less watched the last package go astray. Watching online, I discovered the claimed delivery the very morning it was supposed to happen -- as I recall, within an hour of the "fact." By now I was mad, and difficult as such things are for me, I pursued all the leads I could, including pestering the mail-room guy from the largest tenant in the building, and calling every phone number inside the GPO that I could get.

Given the dates and times of the claimed deliveries, you would think that the work records would show almost instantly who made the supposed delivery, and it would at least be possible to ask that person what the deal was. But somehow that never seemed to be possible, and somehow no one ever knew anything. Do i have to tell you that none of the promised return calls was ever made? Not one.

Eventually I filed formal complaints and wrote a letter nothing that my next letter would be copied to every level of postal executive I could think of plus my senators and the congressmen representing both the GPO's district and mine. Incredibly, I got an answer. From a very polite gentleman who said he was sorry about my problem, and promised to send a test postcard to make sure I was getting deliveries. Of course I got the test postcard, but my problem wasn't not getting test postcards, it was getting real packages. In his deepest-sorry mode, he explained that there was nothing more he could do if the packages weren't insured.

As it happens, one of the packages was insured, which was fortunate because that was several hundred dollars' worth of CDs and DVDs. As I pointed out in the above letter, though, the Postal Service dragged the claim-processing process out for something like three months. And finally I got a duplicate shipment, except for one item that had gone out of stock during the wait, and I got either a credit or a refund for that.

And I have to add that the other two packages, which together probably added up to maybe half the value of the big one, were eventually replaced by the shipper when I complained that the shipping notice I got originally said that the package would be sent by UPS. Now UPS's service has deteriorated seriously since the days when it was aggressively wooing business away from the USPS. Still, it's better, at least for office shipments. Since there's no one to sign for anything at home, shipments there are a real problem, but to the office, as of yet no problem.

Alas, thinking it was being helpful, the shipper made a partial shipment of my order, and sending it by mail! And the rest of the order was shipped within a day, also by mail. (In fairness, they may actually have been shipped from different locations. I don't think I had any way of telling that.) So I wasn't out anything on that deal, as long as you don't count stress damage. Still, the merchant was out the cost of the duplicate shipment, where it's only fault was not knowing about the pilferage problem in Manhattan.

Now, as I've mentioned, my office is in the building next to the New York Stock Exchange, and we're part of the same security umbrella. All deliveries coming into the building are checked by NYSE security. I like to think that this at least closes one pore in the leaky delivery pipeline. As I think back, there was maybe a book or two that I never got, but heck, mail order isn't an exact science. Anyone who expects to get absolutely everything they order (and pay for) is living in a dream world. But as I said in my letter, I was really waiting for this CD. There's a track on it that I really want for Sunday Classics use, for an idea that's had to be put on hold all this time.

Maybe it was my punishment for paying too little for the CD, which is out of print and not that common. The day after I wrote the letter, and printed out copies of the order and the tracking info to go with it, I didn't mail it, but I did find another copy on Amazon.com, considerably more expensive but still not outrageous, and placed the order. It seemed a small enough price to play for closure.

Now, do you want to hear about my experience with FedEx? Let's just say that the next time I have to find their office in the dark in the remote desolation of Mott Haven at the southern tip of the Bronx, I'll know how to find it without wandering all over the South Bronx.

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