Saturday, January 03, 2004

The Upper East Side and the USPS

Apparently, the Postal Service thinks that East Side walkup residents are not interested in receiving any packages, because they never deliver any without at least three notices and a visit on your behalf to the post office. Three times now we've had issues getting packages delivered to our apartment: most recently two Christmas presents, and before that, a roll of stamps we ordered from the USPS web site. See, the way it works up here in the 10128 area code is that our mail comes from the Yorkville Station post office on 3rd Avenue, but the mail carriers operate from Gracie Station on 83rd St. So if we ask for a package to be redelivered (because we were home but the carrier didn't bother to knock on our door or buzz our apartment and just left a notice instead) the carrier gets the package from Yorkville and takes it to Gracie. If we're home again but they don't drop off the package, it goes back to Yorkville. Or maybe to Gracie, depending on who we ask or what the mail carrier feels like doing. When we call Yorkville Station (because it's the number on the notices they've left us) they tell us to call Gracie Station. When we call them, they tell us that our mail is at Yorkville Station, so we should call them. Eventually, we get our packages, but it's always a struggle. We've been through this three times, and we're sick of it. So if you're going to send us something, e-mail me for my office address. My firm has a superior mail room staff that is happy to deliver any package large or small, with several layers of record-keeping to insure that it got there.

Oh, I almost forgot: last Tuesday, we didn't get any mail at all. Not because we didn't have any, but because the mail carrier must have skipped our building altogether. We taped the redelivery notice to our mailbox that morning, and it was still there when I got home from work after 6 PM. Someone finally collected it when they delivered mail on Wednesday.

And the USPS wonders why they're losing business to UPS and FedEx.

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