What a shocker - the Post Office Still Sucks!
Today I ventured into the "unhappy place" to send a package to my grandparents. Keep in mind, I'm quite used to sending packages and do it more often than most Ordinary Joe-Schmoe's. After I enter the line, just as lots of people start to join it, of course one of the two cashiers decides this is when she has to leave. Typical.
The women in front of me hands the man a bunch of envelopes from a former addressee that she doesn't know. He informs her that she needs to write "no longer lives here" on each envelope in the future. Then he proceeds to do it there before he processes the rest of her transaction. You'd think they had a stamp.
This post office is also the only post office I've ever been to who won't take your letters at the counter - even if you're conducting other transactions there. I once saw one of the employees make a fragile older gentlemen with a cane take his envelope back to the lobby drop box. I can't believe they don't take envelopes at the counter!
So I get up front and hand him my package and ask if it is eligible for "Delivery Confirmation" - which is something you pay extra for just to confirm that they will actually be doing the job you are paying them to do to begin with. He eyeballs it and tells me no because it's not 3/4 inch. Grrrr. I ask him if he's just going to make that decision solely by looking at it and he pretty much says yes. I have a feeling it might have been close.
So I was mostly mailing envelopes and pictures within my package, and one thing was a ziplock baggy, folded in half with a couple things in it. This provided a bit of a bump to the manila envelope (the "zipper" of the ziplock), but nothing to write home about. So he feels my package and told me that first he is going to strongly recommend that I consider repackaging it in something firmer so that that hard point doesn't snag and all of my contents don't get lost. I tell him I'm just going to trust that the post office will actually do their job this time and will deliver my package safely. He tells me that it is my job to package the material properly. If you refer back to what he told the lady before me it would seem that he is big on telling others what their job is. Keep in mind I have seen people mail much more questionably wrapped items than this - the probability of any other post office from my past giving me grief about this package would, I imagine, be less than 2%!!!
So - he tells me my rate is going to be $1.50 (I'm almost positive that was the amount). But then he placed one stamp on it and left three more stamps on top of it for me to place. Every time I ever mail something like this at the post office they ALWAYS meter it. He told me I could put the stamps on myself (which came to $1.52 and not the $1.50 I would have paid for metering) and then drop it in the slot. I said I was paying for the postage here, why couldn't he just mail it at the counter because that's what always happens whenever I go to any other post office. He said that he is not going to put HIS meter on a package that I refuse to rewrap. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?!?!?!?!? Meanwhile my mind is filling with profane words that I am not saying, and I am truly baffled that he is allowed to make such a decision. The "difficulty" of my package would probably be akin to placing a pickle in a sandwich. Before the pickle the sandwich was smoother, but after the pickle it doesn't really mess it up at all.
So I ask him if there is a phone number I can call to complain about my service today and he gives me the card for the 1-800 #. I call it quite soon after from a payphone (because I do think they tamper with people's mail and I don't want to call from the home phone), and of course, they are already out for the evening - even though this is the national hotline. I'm very unpleased at the moment. I can't believe he could pull something like that, like it was his own little dictatorship!
The women in front of me hands the man a bunch of envelopes from a former addressee that she doesn't know. He informs her that she needs to write "no longer lives here" on each envelope in the future. Then he proceeds to do it there before he processes the rest of her transaction. You'd think they had a stamp.
This post office is also the only post office I've ever been to who won't take your letters at the counter - even if you're conducting other transactions there. I once saw one of the employees make a fragile older gentlemen with a cane take his envelope back to the lobby drop box. I can't believe they don't take envelopes at the counter!
So I get up front and hand him my package and ask if it is eligible for "Delivery Confirmation" - which is something you pay extra for just to confirm that they will actually be doing the job you are paying them to do to begin with. He eyeballs it and tells me no because it's not 3/4 inch. Grrrr. I ask him if he's just going to make that decision solely by looking at it and he pretty much says yes. I have a feeling it might have been close.
So I was mostly mailing envelopes and pictures within my package, and one thing was a ziplock baggy, folded in half with a couple things in it. This provided a bit of a bump to the manila envelope (the "zipper" of the ziplock), but nothing to write home about. So he feels my package and told me that first he is going to strongly recommend that I consider repackaging it in something firmer so that that hard point doesn't snag and all of my contents don't get lost. I tell him I'm just going to trust that the post office will actually do their job this time and will deliver my package safely. He tells me that it is my job to package the material properly. If you refer back to what he told the lady before me it would seem that he is big on telling others what their job is. Keep in mind I have seen people mail much more questionably wrapped items than this - the probability of any other post office from my past giving me grief about this package would, I imagine, be less than 2%!!!
So - he tells me my rate is going to be $1.50 (I'm almost positive that was the amount). But then he placed one stamp on it and left three more stamps on top of it for me to place. Every time I ever mail something like this at the post office they ALWAYS meter it. He told me I could put the stamps on myself (which came to $1.52 and not the $1.50 I would have paid for metering) and then drop it in the slot. I said I was paying for the postage here, why couldn't he just mail it at the counter because that's what always happens whenever I go to any other post office. He said that he is not going to put HIS meter on a package that I refuse to rewrap. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?!?!?!?!? Meanwhile my mind is filling with profane words that I am not saying, and I am truly baffled that he is allowed to make such a decision. The "difficulty" of my package would probably be akin to placing a pickle in a sandwich. Before the pickle the sandwich was smoother, but after the pickle it doesn't really mess it up at all.
So I ask him if there is a phone number I can call to complain about my service today and he gives me the card for the 1-800 #. I call it quite soon after from a payphone (because I do think they tamper with people's mail and I don't want to call from the home phone), and of course, they are already out for the evening - even though this is the national hotline. I'm very unpleased at the moment. I can't believe he could pull something like that, like it was his own little dictatorship!
posted by The Shababbler at 6:52 PM
1 Comments:
"He informs her that she needs to write "no longer lives here" on each envelope in the future. Then he proceeds to do it there before he processes the rest of her transaction. You'd think they had a stamp."
He should have had a stamp WTF!? I guess it's good to have decent customer service, but making everyone wait while he wrote it when he already told her what she needed to do seems wrong to me.
"he placed one stamp on it and left three more stamps on top of it for me to place. Every time I ever mail something like this at the post office they ALWAYS meter it."
Excuse me? what happened to not putting tons of stamps on things? Homeland security and such?
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