Brought to you by Mrs. HM, who looks for zebras when she hears hoofbeats...today's tale of non-intrigue involving mail delivery between Hillmomba and Oklahoma.
As you may recall, on Monday, I proposed a theory for such poor mail service. It involved possible student workers in the campus post office. AHA! Looks like ol' Sherlock HM was on the right track. Investigation over the innernets revealed that the facility employs two regular postal workers, and two work-study students. So it IS conceivable that the student personnel changed at the end of spring semester, and somebody doesn't know what they're doing.
I took my case to the main post office in Hillmomba on Tuesday. Under the guise of buying stamps (it only cost me $10 for my entire investigation) I interrogated the counter man who once gave me a free three cents worth of postage due to lack of coinage.
Sure, I didn't have to buy stamps. But I'll be needing them by next week anyway. So I led with that, and then the unassuming statement,
"I also have a question. It's not really your problem, but you might be able to give me some information."
See? I was not accusatory at all. I explained the recent 10-day delivery span, my 3-week-old returned letter, shoved it across the counter for his perusal, and ventured my possible theory of mail delay.
The counter clerk peeled that yellow strip off the bottom of the letter. Looked perplexed for a moment. Digested all my facts. Then said, "We've been getting a lot of returned mail lately. It's possible, what you say. But I'm more likely to think it's a problem with the scanners. They go through so many pieces of mail per second that it's unbelievable. I think it kicks some of the mail out, just because it scans too fast. See here? They tried to forward it, but were unable."
I don't know what he meant by that, but I didn't want to tie up the line for a detailed Q & A. He suggested that I call that specific post office, and ask about the validity of the address, just in case it's been changed. I told him I would, if the letter I gave him today did not arrive in a timely manner. He said, "I do agree that 10 days is excessive for first class mail."
I was almost home, tooling up the gravel road in T-Hoe, when I got a text from The Pony.
"The letter from the 13th came today."
So...the most recent letter, with the exact same address, mailed on Friday the 13th...got there in three business days, on Tuesday the 17th. Very timely. One of the fastest turnarounds ever from Hillmomba to Oklahoma.
I think the post office needs a quality control investigation. Oh, wait. It's a government entity. That'll never happen.
Those guv-ment workers... You think there's a chance their performance will improve?
ReplyDeleteIn the giant mail sorting houses those scanners do sometimes get jammed up and spit out letters that are backing up behind the jam. The person running the scanner is supposed to watch out for that and any letters that get spit out are supposed to get fed back in. That's as much as I know. I once worked in one of those places and ran the machine a couple of times, they're super fast and I got pretty tired by the end of the shift. Usually I worked on the side of the catalogue sorting station, adding extras into each catalogue and stuffing them in envelopes or stuffing the finished envelopes into boxes by post code (zip code) numbers. It wasn't a fun job, some of the girls were snarky when I learned things too fast.
ReplyDeleteSioux,
ReplyDeleteHaving worked for a state government agency, I'm pretty sure it won't. But they will probably develop more detailed excuses.
***
River,
I can understand that. When I worked at the unemployment office, taking claimants' paperwork off the rack, to review their work search...the other employees made it clear that one person doing the job too fast would make the others look bad, and that it would behoove me to blend in with the rest of them. It was a lesson in "Sometimes, you have to go along to get along."
Maybe this clerk was right about the machine thing, even though it doesn't seem to ever affect Genius's letters.
Here is the address for quality control for the US mail:
ReplyDelete质量控制
50你永远不会找到我的街道
上海，中国
fishducky,
ReplyDeleteHeh, heh! I don't doubt that.
I live in the very very Southwestern corner of Missouri, 1/2 mile from Arkansas and 6 blocks from Oklahoma. We mail a letter from the Bank here in town to a town in Oklahoma 16 miles away and it can take anywhere from 2 days to 15 days or longer to get there. The mail service has gone from a pretty reliable business to one that is so bad and undependable that it is ridiculous. It deserves to go under with the kind of service that exists now.
ReplyDeleteNancy,
ReplyDeleteThere must be a force field at the border! Genius is in Kansas City MO, and his letter gets all the way across the state over the weekend. I mail it Friday, and he has it Monday. I mean ALL THE WAY across the state. We're about 25 miles from Illinois.
You could toss that letter up in the air, and it would BLOW THERE before the post office delivered it! IF the wind switched direction, and blew from east to west.