Automation and the USPS

From this title, one could sum up the blog post in a paragraph. The US Postal Service has become so automated that no longer can we expect all mail to go through in a timely manner.

Some of it that arrives at my house is no longer going to go through. Period.

Why?

Because I'm done with this particular frustration. I no longer give a shit whether it's legal or not to open up someone else's mail. And by someone else, I mean a someone who is not a member of my household.

You see, for the last couple of years we've been getting mail addressed to a dentist in another city. The street address to her office happens to be exactly the same as my street address, but the city is different...and twenty miles away.

A second oddity is that the zip codes to the two cities are one digit different. One ends in 17, and the other in 27. Easy enough for someone to mis-type.

The final oddity is that the dentist herself resides in the same city as I do, but at an address totally dissimilar to mine.

When we first began getting this mail, it was a matter of putting the envelope back in the box notated that it needed to go to the other city.

But that must have been when she was first beginning her business. Now we get several pieces of mail a week. We get x-rays. We get insurance checks.

How do I know this? Because I open them and look, knowing full well I'm breaking the law.

Since I'm normally a law-abiding citizen, I'll tell you more of the tale.

As more and more mail came to my house, I looked closer and saw that the zip code was wrong. The mail was, indeed, coming to the correct street address and zip code - never mind that the city was completely mismatched. It seemed that one doesn't even have to put the city on the envelope, as the street and zip code will be the only things looked at by the post office.

So, I began gathering up the mail and once a week or so, I'd deliver it to the post office after correcting the zip code.

But then, I discovered that the guys in brown also had the wrong address when I received flowers on Valentine's Day that were not for me, but for her...and delivered here.

Things seemed to slow down for a few months with little mail to her being delivered with my mail. When autumn began, mail also increased. I began my trips to the post office again.

By Christmas I was angry. A lot of this stuff looked like junk mail. So, one day I opened up one of the envelopes and found several hundred dollars worth of checks made out to the dentist. I looked up her phone number and called her.

And got voice mail. Several hours later, I received a phone call from her. To make things even more pleasant, she has one of those voices that are fingernails on the chalkboard. *shudders* Talking to her on the phone is painful. I'd hate to be her patient! I can't imagine having to listen to both her AND the dental drill!

Anyway, I explained the situation, apologized for opening her mail and she was not angry that I did so under the circumstances. She was in another state on vacation over the holidays and asked if I could hold the mail till she returned home.

When she picked the mail up, I showed her that the zip code was wrong, and suggested that she contact her vendors and correct the error so she'd receive her payments in a timely manner. She said she would do so.

She hasn't. We've had to call her on several occasions to ask her to pick up her mail. She even asked us if we could drop the mail off at her house if it was inconvenient when they could drop by our house.

Robert made an effort to stay home one day to hand off the mail and they never showed up.

Enough is enough. I'm opening every piece of mail that arrives here, calling the vendors and insurance agents myself and requesting they change the zip code so the mail will be delivered properly and promptly to her.

I'm not calling her to tell her the mail is here, either. She can call me when she realizes that money should be coming in and has not gotten to her. She can have the checks reissued when she figures it out.

I don't care if she whines to me in that gawd-awful voice that her secretary fucked up and didn't do the job. It's her income, not mine and I've done my best to help make her business work. But, she needs to address (no pun intended) the issue and get her business places notified.