Oct12

stamped.

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  a notice recently arrived 

telling me the stamps i’d ordered online

 from the post office this past summer

were finally arriving in my mailbox

it had been so long

 i’d forgotten about them

told me what day they’d be delivered 

then they weren’t there

even though

they were marked as ‘delivered’ online.

they were not there all week

went to the post office

i have the nicest mailman in the world

but wanted to see if they could find them

woman at the desk

said i had to request a refund on their website

after navigating through

using the tracking code

filling in all the blanks 

it responded

“not eligible for refund as it was not insured.”

read it a couple of times

wait, wasn’t it coming from them to me?

weren’t they the post office, the ones who i was buying them from?

weren’t they supposed to deliver them to me?

wasn’t that their one job?

my mailman said he’ll check all the boxes nearby 

but i fear they are lost in the abyss.

next time i’ll ask them to please insure their own product before trying to send it to me using their services.  

—

“and then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.”

-amy tan

70 responses »

  4. There is an expression in French, that says: Le cordonnier est toujours le plus mal chaussé, translated verbatim is The cobbler is always the one with no shoes. I tried to find the English equivalent and supposedly the equivalent proverb is “It’s always the baker’s children who have no bread”. All this to say… doesn’t it figure? How frustrating!

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  10. We have a one-person post office. She has good taste in stamps to have on hand. Generally, though, I think the USPS does a great job. What they have to do seems impossible, if you think about it. I just try to avoid the bureaucracy.

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    • it is really hard for me to imagine that things can move from one point to another and actually get there, and the majority of the time they do. it’s when something happens along the chain, that it’s hard to unravel.

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  12. I’m sorry. My second daughter is a letter carrier for the postal service, a job she started after losing her Spanish medical interpreting job at the start of the pandemic. She works incredibly hard, delivering mail six days a week working up to 10-hour days, getting called in on her days off… There’s an extreme shortage of postal employees. This doesn’t specifically address what happened to you, just to share what the situation is within the USPS.

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    • oh, I do understand, it’s a tough job, especially these days and I absolutely love my mail carrier, he is wonderful, just the systems that sometimes make no sense.

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  16. Are those the stamps you ordered? They’re beautiful! I’d be terribly disappointed if I’d ordered them and didn’t get them. It’s been a number of years since I bought stamps. My last book of forever stamps is still not used up. I so rarely use stamps anymore.

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  17. My little borough doesn’t have its own post office. There is one in the town to the west and one in the town to the east. The one to the east is responsible for our mail delivery. Overall, the carriers do a good job. But… the staff inside the actual brick and mortar walls of the post office are some of the rudest customer service people I have ever met! Even the people from that actual town go to the branch to the west of me when possible!

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  25. I love stamps and writing letters and cards but have never, ever ordered them. I go in and make them hand them too me and hope like heck I can get those elusive little stinkers all the way home. I wonder if they take flight on their own? Those were too pretty to lose. The new guy running the post office seems to have made the stamps run off too.

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  26. Blimey, that sounds so much like stories I ‘lived’ (suffered) through in France. But this is really taking the biscuit…. I buy all my stamps online because that way I can choose from all sorts of beautiful ones which wouldn’t be available at the post office.
    More luck next time – but I would complain as long as necessary to get the money back.

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