IMNSHO

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Posted By: Rick McQuillan

Hello,I am not taking sides in this dispute, but for the last week I have been reading these posts with the comments about the Postal Service. As a Postmaster, I deal with these things on a daily basis. It seems that the bulk of my time is spent dealing with customer problems, and when I get home at night I am too burned out to get involved in more Postal issues. But here it is on Saturday morning, I've had a good nights sleep, so here goes.

1. You would not believe the packages that people try to mail. The clerks in my office are well trained not to accept packages that they KNOW won't make it through the system. They help the customer pick out a suitable box and they provide tape to ensure that the package is suitable for shipping. My clerks will not sell insurance for a parcel that is not properly packaged. Why would we want to insure a package that isn't properly packaged. Many times my clerks will put extra tape on a package after the customer has left just to be sure that the package will be safe.

2. When you are shipping a package it would help if you knew how the packages were handled. When packages leave my office we might have 3-4-500 packages in a large hamper. The packages on the bottom have a lot of weight on them, so it pays to make sure that they are packaged properly.

The hamper goes in the back of a truck, which might be zero degrees in the winter and 100 degrees in the summer. When the truck gets to the first parcel processing plant the hamper is removed from the truck and rolled to a big parcel sorting machine. The hamper is lifted up, turned upside down, and the parcels fall onto a conveyor belt. The belt takes the parcels through a scanner that reads the barcodes, and dumps them into another hamper, ie one hamper for Chicago, one for Milwaukee, etc. Then this process continues at each plant along the way.

The moral of this story is to securely protect the items that you are mailing because there will be bumps and bruises along the way. I have shipped many framed photos w/glass and I haven't had any problems.

3. I agree with the person that posted about the need for insurance and that the Postal Service should be liable for any damaged package, whether insured on not. I beleive that in the near future all packages will be bar coded and basic insurance will be include with each package.

4. Every Post Office has rubber stamps that say: Received in damaged condition, or Received without contents. We also have rolls of tape that say: Received in damaged condition, Received without contents, and Repackaged by the Postal Service. If we the item is small we generally use a plastic bag to reseal it, and for larger items we re-tape the package.

5. My office receives an average of 200 parcels per day and we ship out about the same amount. I receive approximately 3-4 insurance claims per year, and we may receive 1-2 damaged or unsealed parcels per month, so well over 99% of the parcels are arriving safely.

6. My guess is that Mark shipped his package and it ended up on the bottom of a hamper with a couple of hundred packages on top of it, which put pressure on the cardboard flaps and the tape seal. When the parcel went through the scanning/sorting machine the cards fell out. They are probably in the lost and found/registry section of the one of the processing plants. Normally these items are kept at the plant for a couple of weeks and then sent to a Mail Recovery Plant for auction at a later time if they go unclaimed. Our local lost and found section in Madison receives dozens of keys, cash, bank deposits (dropped in a collection box by mistake), jewelry, etc, every day because these items were not properly packaged. These items are tracked very closely, and if a customer contacts me right away I can normally recover the items and return them to my customer.

7. One other piece of advice-Never sent a card in a top load in a regular evelope. Always put cards in a bubble mailer. When you put a card, or a key, or any other slightly thick item in a regular envelope, you need to remember that these envelopes are traveling through a series of machines that sort 30,000 letters per hour. At these high speeds the thick items will get knocked out of a regular envelope.

I hope that this helps everyone understand the process. It would be nice if we could treat each package in a delicate manner, but the sheer volume of parcels that runs through our system makes it impossible for this to happen.

Take care,
Rick

(I will be out Xmas shopping for the rest of the day, so I won't be able to respond right away if any questions arise from my post.

P.S. Barry, thank you for asking about the title of the post. I didn't have any idea what it meant either. (I received my first text message yesterday, and it was a wrong number)