Life’s Mysteries
Why is the best way to ensure a piece of certified mail comes is to make sure that you aren’t home when the postperson arrives?
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Huh?Report
Murphy’s Law. When waiting for something important (that has to be signed for), you can wait and wait but it won’t arrive until you need to leave for the store for five minutes and so you miss it.Report
@will-truman
In my case I was out for a few hours and almost decided to do so because I was getting angry at myself for just sitting around all day waiting. It is not super important but I am more angry for the sake of principle.
I am currently working remotely for a not quite small but not quite medium sized firm that is not local, I’m a man in Havana if you will. The payroll department is not even in California. There have been issues with getting me my paychecks because they don’t do direct deposit for independent contractors. The first two checks ended up getting sent to me by overnight FedEx because they were not cut until I sent follow-up emails asking about them.
Payroll was very apologetic and promised from now on the checks would be sent by Priority Mail. This check went out promptly but they used certified mail, not priority mail and then there were some strange SNAFUs here. It was marked as being out for delivery on Friday morning but for somereason mid day it became “rescheduled for delivery on Saturday”
I went to my post office and asked what was up. I was told that it should be at my apartment by 1 PM tomorrow and to stop by the post office after 1 if it was not. I stop by at 1:30 and was told that the letter somehow got resorted to another post office in another part of town at 1 in the morning or afternoon today. So I just to just stay out and lo and behold I get the “Sorry we missed you” slip when I get back at 4. My normal postman was already here in the morning with another package and said he did not have a certified letter for me.Report
What percentage of the time does your mail arrived on time and without complication?Report
Jesus…
Yah know if you can’t mail me a check and get it to me on time…i’m not sure I need to work hard for ya until you do….Report
I’m a man in Havana if you will.
You fix vacuum cleaners?Report
@kazzy
I know most mail gets delivered without a hitch but it was just a little vent. Have you never needed to vent about something which many people might consider a bit insignificant?
@damon
That would go against my sense of professionalism
@mike-schilling
Among other things….Report
I don’t consider the matter insignificant. I just missed the part where you made clear that the question posed here was rhetorical in nature.Report
@damon
No kidding. And how hard is it to set up a damned automatic deposit? It works out to less effort that cutting, signing, and mailing a check every month.Report
My ex-girlfriend had an employer that forward-dated checks. If she tried to deposit them beforehand, they’d bounce. Sometimes they would bounce anyway…Report
Sometimes when companies don’t have direct deposit they may get to keep money from employees that forget to deposit their paychecks. {shuffles feet} Of course, when the checks are eventually found and it can wreak havoc on their accounting.
Not that I would know anything about this, or have gotten angry calls from accounting because of it. {shuffles feet}Report
@mike-schilling
Companies don’t always do that for independent contractors.Report
@saul-degraw
Rigorous compliance to the terms of your contract/purchase order is the highest order of professionalism…to yourself.Report
“Rigorous compliance to the terms of your contract/purchase order is the highest order of professionalism…to yourself.”
That’s not how *I* learned how to fill-in the fortunes in fortune cookies…Report
Will is the encyclopedia of shitty companies.Report
The hard thing is that both those statements or the assumptions behind them are good ones. They’re both hard to put either into practice. One agrees to do something for pay, but one doesn’t get paid on the agreed-upon schedule. One can then stop work that is very much needed (to the customer) and damage not only one’s sense of professionalism but potentially a reference for further jobs. Or one can continue working without pay (or with delayed payment) and be or have the reputation as a “true professional” but run up expenses and have another reputation as someone who can be pushed around.
tl;dr: I’ve never worked freelance before, and I’m glad I don’t, and that’s one of the reasons why.Report
I am still a lawyer and being a lawyer has deadlines and responsibilities that go above and beyond pay. Plus being a freelancer is tricky in that I want continued work.
In their defense, they have always been apologetic when this happens and they probably did not have to FedEx me checks overnight.Report
Because your doorbell doesn’t work?Report
That’s a semi-serious answer. The doorbell to the apartment my wife and I rent doesn’t work, and we have to be very vigilant about things like deliveries, ordering our, etc.Report
No the buzzer and doorbell work fine.Report
We don’t even have buzzer that pretends to work and doesn’t.Report
That’s far better than having a buzzer that doesn’t work. People don’t tap a buzzer that isn’t there, and you don’t have to put a sign up saying that the buzzer doesn’t work.
We have a problem that people knock on the “basement” door and we don’t hear it. We need a sign.Report
That’s true. Though often it means they just pound loudly for a minute and then give up.Report
For us, it’s less of a problem in practice than in theory.
For ordering out, which we do about 3 or 4 times a month, we just give them our landline and the delivery person calls from their cell phone. (It’s not lost on me how ubiquitous cell phones have become that we can count on the delivery person owning one. That’s a point against my anti-cell phone luddism.)
For mail deliveries, we live in a neighborhood where the neighbors are very vigilant about what goes on. So if someone drops off a package, the odds are very good it won’t be stolen. It’s not perfect, but there are a lot of people who stay home during the day and take it upon themselves to “police” the block for anything unusual. (There is of course a huge potential downside to this. If someone doesn’t “belong” in the neighborhood, or worse, looks like he/she doesn’t “belong”–that is, if they’re not white–I imagine they probably feel less welcome or safe. I don’t want to bait my neighborhood as some sort of racist enclave. It’s probably more complicated than that, I’m sure. But I imagine that the attitude is there.)Report
While we’re grousing about the Post Office, the thing I always loved about it most was Saturday delivery. But now that they don’t deliver packages to my house, it might as well not exist because the Post Office is closed on Saturdays and I can’t get it until Monday anyway. FedEx and UPS, on the other hand, wouldn’t require me to go anywhere on Monday.Report
Why won’t they deliver packages to your house?Report
They say our street is too narrow. Our neighbors have the same problem.Report
@will-truman
My parents have a house that is at the top of a hill and need to go to the post office to pick up packages because their mail box is at the bottom of the hill. UPS and FedEx will deliver packages to the house though. They did have an issue with someone trying to deliver something in too big a truck though. You can’t get a full sized moving truck up their hill.Report
That sounds pretty similar to our situation (or mailbox and trash collection are both at the end/bottom of our street). When I took it up with them, I expected them to say it was about the incline.
When we have a substitute postal carrier (like over Christmas when they had extra help) they do deliver, which is nice.Report
I’m trying to make sense of the USPS delivering packages on Sunday on behalf of Amazon. Is Amazon basically contracting with them to ensure their 2-day deliver guarantees are hit?Report
@kazzy
That seems plausible.Report
@kazzy
Yes, think so. Quite a few internet retailers that I use seem to be delivering stuff via the USPS. It gets shipped from where ever via UPS or Fed ex to a local USPS location and then delivered by the USPS…
odd…Report
Yeah, my mailman was dropping off packages on a Sunday and I asked him about it, he confirmed that Amazon has a deal with the PO to deliver on Sundays for that reason. He then showed me the back of his truck, which was pretty full, of Amazon packages only. So Amazon is pushing a lot of volume through the PO, which is probably good for them. I assume the postal employees get overtime, paid for by Amazon presumably?
It’s kind of funny, Saturday postal delivery might be going away, but that was mostly junk mail I didn’t need. Now I can get stuff I do need, delivered on Sundays.Report
I assume the postal employees get overtime, paid for by Amazon presumably?
Might be, although I don’t see any particular reason to assume that that’s the case, when they could just hire more workers and get it done without paying overtime. Amazon paying the workers directly seems unlikely, if that’s what you meant. It’s probably more a case of them paying USPS and USPS working out the personnel issues, as well as skimming a bit off the top.Report
No, I didn’t mean Amazon was paying them directly, just that the money to pay them is basically coming from Amazon. But wouldn’t it be easier to pay extant postmen who already know the delivery routes time and a half, as opposed to hiring newbies and training them and paying them half what the old experienced postmen make?
Though I was really referring more to the drivers and not thinking about the rest of the operations, which is probably what you mean.Report
Perhaps your mailman doesn’t wish to interact with someone who used the term “postperson” unironically.
I would think a “postperson” would be a euphemism for a corpse.Report
“I would think a “postperson” would be a euphemism for a corpse.”
This was actually clever.Report
I’ve found Canada Post actually the most useful deliverer of letters and parcels, compared to the much more expensive courier services.
My wife works from home, and has seen courier drivers just run up the steps and leave a “you weren’t home, for your convenience your parcel is being held for pickup in a godforsaken industrial suburb several kilometres away, and will be returned to the sender if you don’t collect it in 48 hours” note without knocking, and be back in the van and rolling before she can make it to the door.
We ordered a barbecue shipped to the house (it was only barely more expensive than in store) – sounded like a godsend, since we don’t have a car – and the courier company ended up holding it for pickup further away than the nearest store that had that exact barbecue. I probably spent a total of two hours on the phone over eight or ten calls spanning two weeks and four delivery “attempts” before finally there was a driver who was willing to read the instructions to drop the box off without waiting for a signature (which by the time the box finally arrived in our yard were all over the thing, in printed labels and handwritten notes as well as on our front and back doors).
But the actual posties are willing to drop off a thing on the strength of its not being a class of mail requiring a signature, and if something does need signing, they tend to actually knock and wait a reasonable amount of time, and then if no one answers, they leave it for collection at the postal outlet at the pharmacy two blocks away, where it is held for two full weeks.Report
It would have been less time and effort in the end to just ride with the bike trailer to get the barbecue, especially from the store but even from the courier location. But for each delivery attempt scheduled, it was less effort to get it scheduled than to go pick the thing up. Only when you added up the time scheduling all the failed attempts did it come out longer.Report
Translation of the previous comment:
I like that in addition without addition ending.Report
Well, I thought it was previous; it’s sticky to the end. Amazing.Report