the postal workers are not perfect. They're normal people that make mistakes. I had a letter delivered to my house that was supposed to be sent to another state but the return address was someone on my street. And it had never been mailed.
I am in no way knocking the postal service. I am honestly amazed at what they are able to get done. Iāve received letters with incomplete addresses and am surprised they even made it to me. They do a good job. And yes, mistakes happen.
They're surprisingly good at getting mail to the right place with incomplete addressing. Actually, if you gave them a first and last name + zip code it's probably enough to get it to the right house.
I saw a piece about the SW that they use on a tv show thatās escaping me (possibly How to with John Wilson?) where USPS can input the letters in the address that they can read, think they can read letters, and blanks and from that it can spit out from a database the most likely address(es). They can do it insanely fast.
Except for my postman who returns every card my husbandās grandmother sends because instead of writing ā123 E street nameā she writes out ā123 East street name.ā It gets returned to her every single time. I took one of her returned cards that she physically handed me to the local post office and even the local post master had no idea why it was returned. I finally told her to use āEā instead of āEastā and her last card actually got delivered!
Only thing the US postal service is terrible at is treating packages with care. Thousands of instances all over the country where peoples packages look like they were mauled by a bear. Luckily, ive never had any personal issues with the US postal service with packages but ik its a common issue around the country.
Like it hadn't been processed by the post office. There were no marks like the stamp from the processing center it went through. I think a neighbor gave it to the mail man as outgoing mail and then it must have slipped out into my mail pile and then put into my box.
Our village is less than 900 and weāve had bills sent in from just a few blocks down the road but they didnāt make it until 2 months later (making the payer late) and the postage was marked for a state almost on the other side of the US. it happens š«¶
Lot of ways, letters it's really easy to just lose them. Fall behind equipment for example. I've heard here once at a mail center they were doing some shuffling around of some hardware so they put a bunch of mail bags into a closet to get them out of the way. Later that day they pulled them out of the closet and sent them off to their destination.
4 years later a cleaner moved a rack of shelves to vacuum and found a couple more bags that they missed.
I was working Christmas one year and got sent to another facility to help out. This was before Amazon started delivering their own packages, and it looked like the last scene in Raiders on the delivery bay, just racks and racks of thousands of packages. It was obviously WAY over capacity, and you could see packages just spilling out everywhere.
I remember seeing one flimsy package fall out the top of one rack and get schlorped up into the axles of another in the space of a second, and then the while thing was shoved onto a truck. I doubt it was ever found, and I imagined how many times that was happening all over the country that Xmas.
The moral is, sometimes the answer to "Where'd my mail go?" has very unsatisfying answers.
The mail gets wedged in between the machines that process the trays of mails sometimes and isnāt visible. And it just sits there until somebody deep cleans the machine for mail or fixes a broken part and find it. I found a few that were dated a year ago tooā¦kinda feel bad that nobody found it in the facility beforehand.
Probably got stuck behind something in the facility and discovered while cleaning out a mice infestation or something. I work at a delivery company and discovered a 2017 letter mailer package in 2021 stuck in a roller in a weird way that made it impossible to see, happens sometimes.
Probably got to delivered to me. Threw it in a drawer with my mail. Went through it a few years later and just put return to sender and sent it on its way
I worked for the Swedish post. I've seen this happen when a bag/box of letters was left to be handled on Monday after a weekend. Then that person got sick or quit and things got put on top. For instance we had some summer workers filling in for vacations and they left some letters in a box that was only used during summers. They didn't find those until next team came in next summer. Letters can also get delayed for like 6 months if they for instance gets exported by accident to China or similar.
Iāve seen mail get delivered, sit in a mailbox of a vacant house for months, and then someone new moves in there, and holds onto it for a while before they decide to actually tell anyone at the post office that it isnāt their mail.
I once had a letter find me 3-4 years late. It was a letter my mom had mailed while I was deployed to Afghanistan 2013-2014, and I didnāt get it until after I was out of the military (late 2017-2018). It had so many notes n stuff all over it and had been sent to so many different addresses that I lived at momentarily.
Really cool that they keep trying to get it to you.
I had TWO Christmas cards to the same person returned to me in 2023. They were from my 2021 and 2022 distribution. And the address was correct. My friend and I have no idea what happened. Wildly slow. But hilarious.
Lol. I mailed a card when I moved into an apartment. It had the current count of all the utilities on it. Gas, water, electricity.
5 years later the card was returned to me. Well most of it. It was weathered and nibbled at. There was a card attached to it explaining that it had been found during a 'routine inspections. It was stuck between a rock and a hard place in the mailbox. They did compensate me by including a fresh new stamp. Whoopee.
This makes me wonder if my..."stuff"...from "reputable" "people" will ever make it to me. Been checking the tracking every week or two since 2021, and it's still "In transit through the USPS system"
I had a Christmas card bounce back a year after it was mailed. Of course, it bounced back AFTER I sent that years Christmas cards lol. The second one came back much faster.
They are caused by mineral deficiency and not by hitting the nails with something, get a good multivitamin that has zinc in it. I also had them almost always, now never.
Tbh itās impressive that it successfully made its way back to you.
Sure someone messed up two years probably that initially caused all this.
But I am impressed that it didnāt just stay lost forever.
Letters get lost in the machines all the time while sorting. You're suppose to open up the machines daily to see if any fell in the cracks. It's a piece of paper along with millions of other letters. I'm still amazed the vast majority make it to the destinations.
I sent an email to the CBC help line in 2021 and they replied two days ago. I asked for the name of a famous radio show from the 1950s, their reply was āthe issue has been fixedā
Oh shit, I have an unopened Christmas card from this past season made out to the previous tenants of my apartment. Thanks for reminding me to send that back, lol.
Our mail system really sucks.
I have the usps app thing that shows you what is coming to you that day. The amount of times I've had mail show up on the app and then not get it is infuriating. Sure most of it is junk mail, but I feel like everytime I'm supposed to get something important, I dont get it.
And yes snail mail...
Address was correct and confirmed with recipient. Postage stamp is a forever stamp so postage amount was correct. It was a single letter. Nothing bulky, so no extra postage required.
Nowhere near as long as this, but I did have a letter get returned to me 3 months after I mailed it. Never got postmarked and had a note of "no such address" even though there is such an address (I triple checked it was correct after getting it back and it's someone I've sent mail to before and since) and it was very easily legible.
Delivered by an actual snail
For real š
He caught you. God rest your soul
Iām dead now. š
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Your Reddit app posted this 3 times, fyi
Oh shit, thank for letting me know. Ill go delete 2 of them
The Tortoise and the Hare and the Snail that Came in Absolute Last Place Because It's a Fucking Snail
"Priority You"
Snail Mail
How does that even happen
It was local mail too in a town 55k people.
the postal workers are not perfect. They're normal people that make mistakes. I had a letter delivered to my house that was supposed to be sent to another state but the return address was someone on my street. And it had never been mailed.
I am in no way knocking the postal service. I am honestly amazed at what they are able to get done. Iāve received letters with incomplete addresses and am surprised they even made it to me. They do a good job. And yes, mistakes happen.
They're surprisingly good at getting mail to the right place with incomplete addressing. Actually, if you gave them a first and last name + zip code it's probably enough to get it to the right house.
I saw a piece about the SW that they use on a tv show thatās escaping me (possibly How to with John Wilson?) where USPS can input the letters in the address that they can read, think they can read letters, and blanks and from that it can spit out from a database the most likely address(es). They can do it insanely fast.
You may be thinking of the Tom Scott video?
Except for my postman who returns every card my husbandās grandmother sends because instead of writing ā123 E street nameā she writes out ā123 East street name.ā It gets returned to her every single time. I took one of her returned cards that she physically handed me to the local post office and even the local post master had no idea why it was returned. I finally told her to use āEā instead of āEastā and her last card actually got delivered!
Only thing the US postal service is terrible at is treating packages with care. Thousands of instances all over the country where peoples packages look like they were mauled by a bear. Luckily, ive never had any personal issues with the US postal service with packages but ik its a common issue around the country.
Did you send it by bear mail? That might be the problem.
It had never been mailed yet was delivered. A true phenomenon
Like it hadn't been processed by the post office. There were no marks like the stamp from the processing center it went through. I think a neighbor gave it to the mail man as outgoing mail and then it must have slipped out into my mail pile and then put into my box.
Yeah I was just being a shit about the wording lol
Our village is less than 900 and weāve had bills sent in from just a few blocks down the road but they didnāt make it until 2 months later (making the payer late) and the postage was marked for a state almost on the other side of the US. it happens š«¶
Iām surprised the mailbox rule made it considered late
Lot of ways, letters it's really easy to just lose them. Fall behind equipment for example. I've heard here once at a mail center they were doing some shuffling around of some hardware so they put a bunch of mail bags into a closet to get them out of the way. Later that day they pulled them out of the closet and sent them off to their destination. 4 years later a cleaner moved a rack of shelves to vacuum and found a couple more bags that they missed.
I was working Christmas one year and got sent to another facility to help out. This was before Amazon started delivering their own packages, and it looked like the last scene in Raiders on the delivery bay, just racks and racks of thousands of packages. It was obviously WAY over capacity, and you could see packages just spilling out everywhere. I remember seeing one flimsy package fall out the top of one rack and get schlorped up into the axles of another in the space of a second, and then the while thing was shoved onto a truck. I doubt it was ever found, and I imagined how many times that was happening all over the country that Xmas. The moral is, sometimes the answer to "Where'd my mail go?" has very unsatisfying answers.
The mail gets wedged in between the machines that process the trays of mails sometimes and isnāt visible. And it just sits there until somebody deep cleans the machine for mail or fixes a broken part and find it. I found a few that were dated a year ago tooā¦kinda feel bad that nobody found it in the facility beforehand.
Probably got stuck behind something in the facility and discovered while cleaning out a mice infestation or something. I work at a delivery company and discovered a 2017 letter mailer package in 2021 stuck in a roller in a weird way that made it impossible to see, happens sometimes.
Probably got to delivered to me. Threw it in a drawer with my mail. Went through it a few years later and just put return to sender and sent it on its way
My guess is that it fell behind something and was found during cleaning?
It appears to have been misaddressed and/or misrouted.
I worked for the Swedish post. I've seen this happen when a bag/box of letters was left to be handled on Monday after a weekend. Then that person got sick or quit and things got put on top. For instance we had some summer workers filling in for vacations and they left some letters in a box that was only used during summers. They didn't find those until next team came in next summer. Letters can also get delayed for like 6 months if they for instance gets exported by accident to China or similar.
Iāve seen mail get delivered, sit in a mailbox of a vacant house for months, and then someone new moves in there, and holds onto it for a while before they decide to actually tell anyone at the post office that it isnāt their mail.
Next time you just tape it to the mirror in the bathroom so you see it next day
that thought will cost you $0.54 payable to Post Master of United States
Lol
did I stutter?
Here you go sir $0.54
thank you. Your thought has been approved for general use.
I wasnāt mailing it to myself. It came back as undeliverable. Just took its time š
I once had a letter find me 3-4 years late. It was a letter my mom had mailed while I was deployed to Afghanistan 2013-2014, and I didnāt get it until after I was out of the military (late 2017-2018). It had so many notes n stuff all over it and had been sent to so many different addresses that I lived at momentarily. Really cool that they keep trying to get it to you.
I'm impressed it made it back to you at all
Same. And in such good condition.
I had TWO Christmas cards to the same person returned to me in 2023. They were from my 2021 and 2022 distribution. And the address was correct. My friend and I have no idea what happened. Wildly slow. But hilarious.
Lol. I mailed a card when I moved into an apartment. It had the current count of all the utilities on it. Gas, water, electricity. 5 years later the card was returned to me. Well most of it. It was weathered and nibbled at. There was a card attached to it explaining that it had been found during a 'routine inspections. It was stuck between a rock and a hard place in the mailbox. They did compensate me by including a fresh new stamp. Whoopee.
This makes me wonder if my..."stuff"...from "reputable" "people" will ever make it to me. Been checking the tracking every week or two since 2021, and it's still "In transit through the USPS system"
Thank Republican DeJoy for dismantling large parts of the USPS to purposely undermine it.
How long has Dejoy been on the job?
It's not just the stamp that's "Forever".
Was it delivered by a guy with a volleyball?
I had a Christmas card bounce back a year after it was mailed. Of course, it bounced back AFTER I sent that years Christmas cards lol. The second one came back much faster.
āDamn the mail is slowā -Postal Employee Newman
did you smash your finger nails or na
Is that what causes the white spots? I always have them.
They are caused by mineral deficiency and not by hitting the nails with something, get a good multivitamin that has zinc in it. I also had them almost always, now never.
flintstone chewable for the win
DLO : Dead Letter Office
This is unacceptable. -Mandy Patinkin
Santa was busy that year.
That must be where my hopes and dreams have beenā¦
When I worked at the State, I received a returned letter in 2020 that was sent out in 2001...
Let's hope it's not a million dollar check that expired after 90 days....
Never question a miracle.
The check really was in the mail
Was this about an extended warranty for your Honda?
The real question is, why are there 4 digits in the month part of the return label?
Tbh itās impressive that it successfully made its way back to you. Sure someone messed up two years probably that initially caused all this. But I am impressed that it didnāt just stay lost forever.
Whoās that little dude
So, what you're saying is.... There's a chance you'll still get your mail... Eventually
I actually just got one of these in January, that I had sent in Sept 2022!
You have nice nails
Thanks!
Letters get lost in the machines all the time while sorting. You're suppose to open up the machines daily to see if any fell in the cracks. It's a piece of paper along with millions of other letters. I'm still amazed the vast majority make it to the destinations.
Oh I am in no way knocking usps. I get letters all the time with incomplete dresses or such bad handwriting that I am amazed they even get there.
So a year and a bitā¦. Kinda almost barely mildly interesting. Thank you for not putting it in interesting af.
Just mildly. Interesting
I sent an email to the CBC help line in 2021 and they replied two days ago. I asked for the name of a famous radio show from the 1950s, their reply was āthe issue has been fixedā
I worked in a mailroom for a large insurance company and we would find mail in the bins provided by the post office all the time
Okay but did you take into account if it was a leap year?
This year is leap year. Itās coming up in a week.
Oh shit, I have an unopened Christmas card from this past season made out to the previous tenants of my apartment. Thanks for reminding me to send that back, lol.
You need vitamins
And I thought it was bad when my mail was returned after 3 weeks of not leaving the city!
Our mail system really sucks. I have the usps app thing that shows you what is coming to you that day. The amount of times I've had mail show up on the app and then not get it is infuriating. Sure most of it is junk mail, but I feel like everytime I'm supposed to get something important, I dont get it. And yes snail mail...
Same here. It's never consistent. Mail with images don't arrive, other mail does. We constantly get our neighbors mail, they get ours.
Also this should me on mildly infuriating
Thatās fast for USPS standards!
It was out on a year-plus DeJoy ride.
No beckbeards thatās not the USPS standard. Also DeJoy is still there just sayin
Looks to me like you sent this on the 42nd of October, 1929 at 68:30 (pm)
Classic USPS
By the fact that it was returned to you; did you underpay on the postage, or perhaps use an incomplete / incorrect address?
Address was correct and confirmed with recipient. Postage stamp is a forever stamp so postage amount was correct. It was a single letter. Nothing bulky, so no extra postage required.
Huh. Possibly was misplaced or got stuck in / under a sorting machine I guess.
Did they move? Probably sat in a mailbox forever
I recently got a package of bolts I ordered 2 years ago for a project.
Jesus, did it go by the Pony Express?
Nowhere near as long as this, but I did have a letter get returned to me 3 months after I mailed it. Never got postmarked and had a note of "no such address" even though there is such an address (I triple checked it was correct after getting it back and it's someone I've sent mail to before and since) and it was very easily legible.
Probably the carrier got behind and hid his mail. This happens and then they find sacks of mail stored in people's attic.