Rant #1,770: Return to Sender

I have a bone to pick with the Post Office.

It is not a new bone, an old one, and it has festered recently.

Our local post offices in my neck of the woods are incompetent. It is a complaint that I have had forever, seemingly, but it has really come to the fore very recently.

First, I received a bill in the mail for an EZ Pass violation. That in itself is odd, because I rarely ever use an EZ Pass thoroughfare, but early this summer, I did, when my family and I ventured to Tarrytown, New York.

The whole situation was really strange. I believe I paid all my tolls to and from the town on the two occasions I went there over one weekend.

According to EZ Pass, one of the thoroughfares I used was a no-pay venue, meaning that either you paid through EZ Pass or your license plate was recorded electronically and you were billed.

Since I went to the same place twice, why did I receive a bill from EZ Pass for only one non-payment?

That is another story for another time, but the fact of the matter is that I did not receive the original payment request, which I later found out was sent in July.

Instead, I received a warning notice that since I did not pay the original request, I would now have to pay a fine which lifted the total from $5 all the way up to $30.

I never received the original bill, and I questioned my local post office.

It is not the first time I have done this.

We are the area which made national news a few years ago when it was found that a letter carrier had dumped our mail in the dumpster for whatever reason, and my father alerted me that while we were away on our cruise, there was another incident where mail was suspected to be dumped.

How much you wanna bet that that notice was in the dumped mail?

Anyway, I called my local post office about this, and they said the familiar refrain that they "deliver every piece of mail they get." Well, they did not deliver that bill, and it goes way beyond that.

For years, we have had problems with the post office, whether it is what zip code we use--we at one time sat on the border of two towns with similar names and we used one town's zip over the other, which caused some problems here and there--and we have constantly received mail that has not been directed specifically to us, and we suspect that other addresses have gotten our mail and never gave the errantly delivered mail to us.

It is a problem that goes back decades, but it has gotten worse lately.

Anyway, the post office said they can't trace anything without a routing number, which I did not have and they said that since we had a regular carrier--news to me, we haven't had a regular carrier in at least 30 years if not more--the carrier would be alerted about our mail situation.

I was not happy, but had to leave it at that.

Funny, the very next day, this past Saturday, which is normally a light mail day, we got more mail than we have gotten on probably the previous 10 Saturdays combined, including something specifically I had been waiting for for several weeks and that I had checked on with the sender about its whereabouts just a day earlier.

This made me remember another problem we had with the local post office that I tried to forget. About a year ago, a letter was redirected to us, and it was a bill. The letter was never delivered, and it was returned to us without an explanation. I went to the post office, and they said that the machine reading the forwarding addresses inadvertently read the return address as the forwarding address, and that is why it was returned to me. As I said, this was a bill that I had paid, and they hurriedly took the letter back from me.

Thankfully, I had paid the bill the moment I received it in the mail, so there was time, even with the error made by the post office, to get the letter to where it should have gone in the first place, and the letter did get to its destination in time, but that really isn't the point; why did the machine foul up like it did, and what would have happened if because of this foulup, my payment would not have reached its destination by the due date?

Further, I had a problem when I used accelerated mail to get my papers into the reporting agency that handled the recent Korea trip that my wife and I went on. I had to mail the papers twice--both at the accelerated rate--to get them where they had to go.

Now comes the next problem.

I am having a supposedly surprise birthday party for my wife in a few weeks, and prior to our cruise, I sent out all the invitations, all at once, at another local post office.

Everyone should have received the invitations at the same time--a few were for different parties at the same addresses--but I found out this week that roughly half of the invitations that I sent out have never reached their destination.

As I said, a few were for different parties at the same address, and one party received the invitation, while the others didn't.

How can that be? It's the same address!

Invitations were received from far away, but some local people did not get their invitations.

When I found out about this, all of those who did not contact me one way or the other about the party were contacted, and everything is hunky dory about who is coming and who isn't now, but the question remains, why wasn't the mail delivered?

Over the years, I know that the mail has deteriorated to the point that technology will probably almost entirely wipe it out in 20 years or so. Email, paying for things, including bills, electronically, and social media is making the mail almost totally useless, even today.

But at least right now, the mail remains essential, especially for a person like me, who does not pay for that much online--certainly not bills--and sends out letters every once in a while.

Our local mail continues to fail me, and is getting worse, and the post office is consistent--whether it was 20 years ago or now, they always have an answer when I make a complaint about delivery.

Heck, I don't even use the local post office mailboxes for my mail, and I go into another town to send out my mail.

The post office by us is incompetent, and it pains me to say this, because my grandfather worked for the post office during the Depression as a postal inspector, and my grandmother lived off his pension until the day she died.

Right now, I am closely monitoring our mail, and if I continue to see any problems, I will have to go to the next level. I don't honestly know what else to do--I have gone the post office box route in the past, by the way, and I don't want to go that route again--but something has to be done.

Go fight the post office. Even in today's day and age, it is like punching the wall. It might make a dent, but you are the only one with bruises.