(These are not the actual culprits.)
DETROIT — There were jokes and snickers at a Michigan post office when customers learned that an overwhelmed carrier had rented a storage unit to hide thousands of pieces of mail. “I heard a couple of people come in and say, ‘Can I pick up my mail — or is it in storage?”‘ said Annette Koss, the postmaster in Howell, 50 miles northwest of Detroit. “We just didn’t understand it. It’s such a stupid thing to do.”
Jill Hull pleaded guilty Tuesday to deserting the mail, a misdemeanor. The case is rare but it happens: From North Carolina to North Dakota, carriers in recent months have been hauled to court for failing to fulfill their routes. Mail has been found in basements, garages and, in Hull’s case, a self-storage unit in Michigan’s Livingston County. In North Carolina, a mail carrier admitted to keeping junk mail buried in his backyard. In September, after she had failed to pay her bill, managers opened Hull’s unit and discovered thousands of pieces of unopened mail, including 988 first-class letters. Some had postmarks from 2005.
“I was unable to deliver all the mail,” Hull, 34, said during a brief hearing in federal court in Detroit.
In a court filing, postal investigator Douglas Mills said Hull had planned to catch up with late payments and apparently keep the mail under lock and key until she died. No one on the rural route had complained about missing any mail.
The Postal Service says there were 333 cases of theft, delay or destruction of mail by employees or contractors filed in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. A California postal manager was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing thousands of DVDs.
As long it’s bills and junk mail, in my book she’s a hero, promote her.
Bulk mail is not going away until the USPS does, which I hope never happens. This country had subsidized mail delivery before it was even a country. Every civilized country has a postal service. If the USPS goes away, I can just imagine some “private contractor” asking me just how much my important mail is worth to me, and gouging a little more every week.
And what the hell are “contractors” doing delivering out mail anyway?
#3, it was the only one that suited her….as s/he is a man
Long before “Seinfeld,” “Barney Miller” featured an episode in which a postal worker stashed bulk mail in his apartment rather than deliver it.
While the character did admit wrong-doing, his reasoning what that he wasn’t throwing out anything that people wanted and that he was being more efficient.
Sometimes, I look at my pile of junk mail and think, “yeah, he just may have been right.”
I just got a check that I paid and te USPS postmarked in October 2008 returned to me today. It had a Jan 23 postmark on it, and a yellow lable indicating that the addressee was unknown. The address is exactly correct. Now, I knew back in november that the check never made it to its destination, since I got a call from the addressee wondering where his payment was. So what happened to this, and why did it have a postmark of January 23, only 5 days ago, and why it was returned with a bad address sticker. My theory is that the post office must have found it either alone, or in a large stack of other “missing” mail, noticed how late it now is, and rather than send it, potentially causing all sorts of problems with the ramifications that come from delivering 5 month old mail, and just returned it to the sender to make his/her own decision on how to procede. I believe this, not because I have that much faith in the post office, but because it seems like the prgmatic thing to do, rather than cause a bunch of cascading problems that can come from delivering “stale” mail – duplicate cashed checks, overdrawn accounts, etc. etc.
Any thoughts about my theory??