Tagged: "Courtesy" of the US Postal Service

When it comes to property defacement, the USPS sees no reason to apologize.

When we moved into our house four years ago, the previous owners left their rocking chair, barbecue, and patio furniture, but took the house numbers. As weird as that seemed at the time, it didn't bother us too much. We hired painters, unloaded our boxes, and settled in to home ownership. Days became weeks and then months and then years, and friends and relatives found us without a problem—and our mail appeared in the painted metal box by our porch steps every day without incident.

Last month, our lovely mail carrier of all of these years retired, and with her, my good will for the postal service. The next week, right before we were leaving for the weekend, the mail box beside the porch caught my eye. More specifically, the numbers written on it with a black Sharpee caught my eye—our house numbers. The new mail carrier was the obvious culprit, being the only person with a motive to commit such a crime.

Now, the mailbox had also been left by the previous owners, but it was cute and decorative, so we kept it. They had taken a metal box and painted a faux patina on it to match the faux patina on the brass panels on the front door. Obviously, removing the Sharpee marks was not going to be an option, because that would also remove the paint. The mailbox was ruined.

Incensed, I quit worrying about packing my toothbrush and camera and scoured the US Postal Service Web site for their customer service number. It took some digging, but I found it and was relieved to learn that it was a 24-hour service. After 45 minutes of waiting on hold and listening to the same two prerecorded USPS advertisements for the entire time, a woman came on the line. She took my name and address, but when I explained my complaint, she stopped me. "Because it's after 5 p.m., I can't help you with that," she said. "You'll have to call back tomorrow." "But you're a 24-hour service," I reminded her to no avail. She wouldn't even take a note. My husband patiently listened to me rant about the entire exchange all the way to the airport.

After a relaxing weekend away, I called the USPS first thing on Monday morning. This time, I waited less than 5 minutes, and the person on the other end of the line took my information right away and said I'd be receiving a call back from a representative from my local branch. Sure enough, within two hours, I got a call from our mail-carrier's boss. It was obvious from her tone that she'd never been wrong about anything in her life and that she rarely lets another person get a word in edgewise.

While she expressed some concern that her mail carrier was going around tagging people's private property with a Sharpee, she was more fixated on our lack of house numbers. When I said that this had never come up in all the years we've lived here as the numbers are painted on the curb, she sort of mentioned that normally we would have received a written notice first, but that everyone had to have house numbers on the house. (Never mind that a walk around our neighborhood revealed that a few dozen other houses are numberless and likely still receive mail.) She was intense, and I wanted off the phone. I was too flustered to remember to ask for compensation for the damaged property. I said we would obviously be getting house numbers, but that we would appreciate being alerted in future before the mail carrier writes on our stuff, and left it at that.

At 11:30 the next morning, the doorbell rang. Although the tall woman with the severely tied back hair and semi-professional attire didn't give me her name, I recognized her voice immediately as the house-number champion. I came out onto the porch and showed her the mailbox, and she proceeded to tell me that not only should we have house numbers but that the mailbox was also too low. I stared at her, not believing that this was the "apology" I was receiving. While I don't dispute the necessity of house numbers, our ignorance didn't seem to warrant property defacement. The mail carrier himself eventually joined us, and his boss pointed to the mailbox, saying, "See that, she didn't like that you did that." And he said, "But I had to see the numbers." And she said, "Well, you could have written them inside the lid of the box." Finally, I found my voice. "No, he shouldn't have. I was here the whole time. He should have let me know the problem so that I could fix it." It was like I hadn't spoken.

By the end of this 5-minute encounter, I had been scolded on two counts of mail-carrier thwarting and had not received one shadow of an apology. Before I had the chance to broach compensation for the defaced property, the woman's phone rang, and she answered it, backing down the driveway. I halfheartedly remembered my own manners and shook her hand as well as the mail carrier's. He assured me he would continue to try to do his best, and I nearly bit my lip trying not to say something about if graffiti was his best, how bad could his worst be?

I fumed and stormed and raged after they left—but I knew further action with this crew would result in dirty bureaucratic fighting and perhaps unexpected deliveries that weren't mail. On the bright side, my husband spent the rest of the week making a customized, attractive set of house numbers that are now proudly displayed above our door.

Of course, apparently, he didn't work quickly enough for the USPS, which sent us a form with the line item "No house numbers" checked. The handwritten comments section of the form looked dishearteningly like it had been composed and filled out by a first grader using unlined paper for the first time. It recapped the face-to-face encounter without any mention of the defaced property and reminded us to put up house numbers as agreed as soon as possible. So much for an apology! While this enraged me afresh, I felt slightly vindicated that the form existed—the very form we should have received before the mail carrier ever uncapped his Sharpee.

USPS customer service: *