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from the now-I-won't-get-my-Christmas-cards dept.
Yet another United States Postal Service employee is joining The Mail Carrier Hall Of Shame, after being accused of dumping hundreds of pieces of mail into a ditch — while a local filmed the whole thing.
The USPS is investigating after residents in Decatur, GA reported seeing a mail carrier throwing several bins of mail into the woods behind a subdivision, WSB-TV reports.
The subdivision's HOA president witnessed the dumping on Tuesday, and sent the news station video and photos of incident.
"I sat there and recorded for about five minutes. And he continued to just grab more mail and continued to just toss it over the fence," she told WSB-TV. "At one point he actually stopped and took a break like he was tired, and continued to toss the mail. He eventually drove off like it was normal."
The station tipped off USPS, and the agency dispatched investigators to the scene. Once there, it took five postal workers two hours to collect more than a dozen bins' worth of mail.
- https://consumerist.com/2016/10/20/video-shows-usps-worker-dumping-bins-of-mail-in-a-ditch/
https://web.archive.org/web/20161023092445/https://consumerist.com/2016/10/20/video-shows-usps-worker-dumping-bins-of-mail-in-a-ditch/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20161023092445/http://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/dekalb-county/thousands-of-pieces-of-mail-dumped-in-woods-usps-launches-investigation/458775917
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday October 24 2016, @02:41PM
People use snail mail for incredibly important stuff. Failure to delver things like legal notices or even just bills can have very bad consequences.
Indeed. I used to live at a place with unreliable mail delivery. I have no idea why, but if my carrier was just throwing mail in a ditch somewhere, that might explain some things. Seriously -- in the course of my life, I think I've made two late payments ever on anything, and that was because I was in the process of a move and didn't receive statements.
But that changed at a new address. Over the course of a couple years, I am certain that I failed to receive maybe a dozen critical pieces of mail (including an annual life insurance renewal bill TWICE, a car registration and tax renewal, etc.). At first, I blamed it on the businesses that sent me statements, since I thought maybe my address hadn't been updated or something. Or, maybe it mistakenly went to a neighbor. (I frequently received stuff from my neighbor's mail at that address too.)
Then it kept happening and I know that the missing mail should have come from at least 4-5 different sources. They couldn't all be messing up my address. Considering that I handle almost all bills and statements electronically now, I receive a critical piece of snail mail maybe only a couple times per month. The number of them that went missing was statistically unlikely, and I had to wonder how much other random mail for me was just "lost." Around the time that I was getting ready to complain to the post office, it turned out that I'd be moving again anyway... and I didn't knowingly "lose" any mail the last 6 months or so I was there anyway.
Snail mail is increasingly becoming irrelevant for a lot of things, but when it matters, it REALLY matters.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday October 25 2016, @07:45PM
It's possible there was an error in the USPS address database.
In my town, two whole streets weren't entered, due to having no street delivery (all PO Boxes). Banks, some credit card companies, stamps.com, etc., all verify addresses with the USPS database, and if your street address doesn't exist or is incorrect in there, the mail will "mysteriously" fail to arrive.
In my case, the USPS system auto-substituted a non-existent address in the nearest town that had the same street name. Fortunately, it's a common street name in the area, and the town was served by the same postal staff, so they recognized my mail and "misdirected" it back to me, but, no matter how many times I corrected my address, every few months, my bank, and everyone else would revert it to match the USPS database.
After about 14 years, the new postmaster finally corrected the database about three months ago--and then the County changed a bunch of local address to comply with 9-1-1 regulations and screwed up the database for another part of town...