PSA - Mail Forwarding

I learned a scary lesson this holiday season. USPS is a joke. That is not the lesson. The lesson is you can't count on them to even forward your mail (even though it's done by machine). I returned home in the middle of the forwarding period and had a full mail box. When I asked my mailman why it wasn't being forwarded (to a friend), he said the main sorting center must not have been alerted. I thought that is why they have a web form connected to a database for? How can it get lost? It's computer to computer. It's automatic. And the mail wasn't all from one day (like a day before the requested start date). It was from everyday since I had been gone.

When I saw my friend (the forward address), he also had a stack of mail (mostly bills) with nice little forwarding stickers on them. Also from varying dates. So, half my mail was forwarded and half was not. So what's the big deal? If I hadn't checked my mailbox at home that mail would have been taken to the post office (when mail box gets full) and thrown out after a period of time (a month I think). I had gift cards and Christmas cards (among other important things) in that pile of mail! And this means that every time I've been gone for for more than a month, I may have lost untold quantities of correspondence. This is because I would have no reason to inquire about any unforwarded parcels and they would be eventually thrown out. They don't even alert you that you have mail at the post office.

The supervisor blamed the mail carrier. She said he was alerted and either ignored it or disregarded it. He is supposed to put a card in the mail box so that any temps or replacement mail carriers know I'm away and the mail shouldn't be delivered there. That is possibly how I received the half and half treatment. A temp delivered and saw no card. I'm still not clear on it. I don't get how my mailman is involved if it is flagged at the sorter level. I think they said some mail slips through and need to be collected/stopped by the mail carrier and relabeled at the post office for forwarding.

And to top it off, they didn't stop the forwarding on the date requested (as usual). I had to call again (every time) and alert them. Good thing we live in such an advanced age. I swear a multitude of things were less screwed up when we had imbeciles running the show instead of machines and computers. Or are the imbeciles so imbecilic today that they circumvent the reliability of the machines and computers? In any case, think twice about forwarding your mail. You may have been a Publisher's Clearing House winner and you would never know.