The Post Office Goes Postal

 

This morning at 10:30 I checked to see if the mail had run.  It usually runs at 9:30 these days.  To my surprise it was scattered around a variety of places.  I had made a point of going out just then because there was high wind and a thunderstorm, along with rain coming down in buckets, and there had been another tornado here yesterday.   My letters were gone with the wind.  My boxes had disintegrated, one of them out in a mud puddle.   I retrieved them, but the box was destroyed.  And I was soaking wet and dashing around out in a storm trying not to be hit by lightning.  Inside the one in the mud puddle was a $700 electrical device from Amazon.  

I decided to call the local post office and complain, which is tricky because their number isn't listed.  However, I knew another post office number off the top of my head and called them and got the number.  Cheesh.  The damsel I spoke to informed me that she was the postmaster.  When I told her what happened, she gave me a tongue lashing.  Oh yeah?  I told her that most packages were put in plastic bags when it was obviously about to rain.  "Not the post office!" she told me.  I responded that the "finer" package deliverers did.  "May I speak to your supervisor?" I asked.  She gave me a number to call.  I told her to learn what customer service is, and hung up.  All I was trying to accomplish was to prevent further catastrophes in the future.  

My call to the postmaster's "supervisor" was an answering machine, and while I left a message, I can't say I felt very good about my postal future.  

Then I called Amazon.  Oh, I managed to round up a nice enough lady to voice my concerns to, but she told me that she could do nothing.  "May I speak to your supervisor?" I asked.  Soon I was finally talking to a person that didn't think $700 electrical devices should be delivered to mud puddles in thunderstorms.  

To my relief, he actually seemed to enjoy hearing me emote about my nightmare experience talking to the post office.  He said, "They think that you need them.  They need the customer or they won't have a job."  He added Amazon has a contract with them to deliver packages, but that when he has spoken to the post office about their shoddy package delivery, they have informed him that they don't do parcels, they do mail.  Oh, they accept money for delivering parcels, but they don't deliver parcels?  "Well, my mail didn't arrive either.  It all blew away.  It's in someone's treetop now."  In fact, most of my mail goes to a post office box just because of postal insanity in the past.  So he allowed me to vent some, and he had a similar opinion of to post office.  He told me that he would take the post office out of the option to deliver from Amazon in the future.  

Goodness, I was relieved to speak to someone that cared that my expensive package was poorly treated.  Thank you Amazon.