I’ve had some strange experiences related to the US Mail, or rather the United States Postal Service. But today’s mail brought me an example of the complete disarray and mysteriously unreliable service of the United States Postal Service. In my mailbox today was a letter addressed to my mother with a yellow sticker saying “undeliverable as addressed.” I looked carefully – and double checked – and the address on the envelope is the exact same address where she has lived for the past five years. It’s the same address where she receives bills, and certainly numerous other letters from me over the past five years. But then, I opened it up in order to retrieve the card inside and put it in a new envelope, and see that it was something I attempted to mail to her 3 months ago! So, where has it been for the past 3 months?
Okay, maybe I’m being a bit harsh – in the course of a year, the USPS handles over 100 billion pieces of mail, so there’s bound to be mistakes and problems. According to one report, the peak volume of mail was approximately 213 billion pieces in 2006, but in the years since then, the USPS has experienced a yearly decline in volume. However, the total volume of mail delivered in 2023 was still over 116 billion units (I wonder what percentage of that is junk mail?), so that’s still a massive amount of mail going through the system.
I’ve had other mail issues between my location on the east coast and my mother’s location in the midwest. She sent me a St. Patrick’s Day card, and it took two weeks to the day to arrive. When you look at this reproduction (above) of a Pony Express poster from 1860, they’re expecting the mail to get from Missouri to California in 10 days or less, which includes the cowboy and his horse sleeping somewhere each night.
I had another case, even more extreme, where I mailed my brother a Christmas card and it came back to me as “undeliverable” over a year later! One really has to wonder where that letter sat untouched for a full year before someone finally found it or gave up and decided to return it to sender. It just boggles my mind.
I know, it’s 2024, and most things can be handled online (such as bills and communicating via email), and there’s probably not much personal mail even being sent anymore, but when one has no confidence in when – or whether – some regular mail will ever reach its destination, it’s a bit frustrating.