I wasn't going to blog about this but having shared the story with Dr. Em, and finally gotten up the courage to open the last of my packages to see how much of the contents survived (about half), I thought I might be doing a public service by posting it. It would have been much worse if I didn't already have a lot of my mom's hand-painted china and if I'd cared more about the antique Limoges which was the primary victim, or God forbid, if it were worth more. (I'm still afraid to see what the bastards did to my box of Hummels.) Bad enough that the PO managed to smash the two most valuable pieces of it (two covered casseroles worth $45 ea.) Here's the letter of outrage I'm sending to various postmasters and the Postmaster General:
To Whom it May Concern,
In May and June of this year (2006), I mailed 18 very well packed boxes full of china and glass in separate batches from the Greenbush (48738), Harrisville (48740) and Oscoda (48750), Michigan post offices. All were shipping-suitable boxes sealed securely with strapping tape, their contents wrapped solidly in newspaper and bubble wrap. All were insured and marked fragile.
Every single box mailed had at least one item and usually several not just cracked or chipped, but smashed to bits, as though somewhere along the line, the box had been heaved onto the ground from, say, the back of a truck. Every single package, no exceptions. At least one arrived with the corners split open (see photos). 
In some, the damage was so bad that I got slivers in my fingers from trying to unwrap the pieces I'd wrapped with newspaper and strapping tape. (See photo of 12" casserole below)
And today, I received merely the fragment of a box: nothing but the flap with the address and some bits of strapping tape on it has apparently survived the latest passage. This would be bad enough if it were an isolated incident. But this has become a pattern and it’s completely inexcusable and unacceptable.
Nor is this something you can blame on the shipper’s poor packing. My parents and I have been mailing packages like these back and forth for thirty years from this location, none of which ever arrived broken. I also recently packed a large collection of dishes and other breakables for a crosstown move in New York City; nothing was broken. When we pack articles for trade shows at my job, I'm asked to do the packing because nothing gets broken when I do it, so I know how to pack, and I packed these boxes personally and with great care. And no matter how badly they had been packed, it’s extremely unlikely that 18 boxes mailed in three separate batches would all sustain this amount of damage unless there was a pattern of extreme carelessness in at least one of the facilities they passed through. I'm probably not the only person to have this problem.
What the hell are you people doing with parcels? Somewhere in your system, you've got a clerk or a couple of them who do not give a shit about how they treat people's goods. Eighteen months ago, when my mother died, I mailed a similar large batch of parcels full of equally fragile items, all of which arrived intact, so this seems to be a recent problem. Somewhere in the system between Greenbush and New York in the last eight months, you’ve hired an extremely careless shipping clerk or two, who needs to be either fired or retrained or reassigned—and certainly needs to be disciplined. I suspect the problem is in Detroit, since this is where the latest debacle took place.
I’ve already made one claim (which was honored) for a piece I fortunately could replace, but the rest were irreplaceable so there’s not much point. Most of the boxes contained irreplaceable hand-painted china painted by my now-deceased mother. Some pieces were my grandmother’s antiques of nothing but sentimental value which I’ve now been robbed of by one (or more) of your clerk’s carelessness. I insured the boxes with the hopes they’d be treated with some respect—not because I ever expected to have to collect the insurance or because I could ever hope to replace the articles. Hundreds of dollars of irreplaceable items have been lost but no amount of money will ever make up for my emotional attachment to them.
I am asking that this pattern of incompetence be investigated and stopped, and I am sending copies of this letter to the postmasters at all the involved post offices and in Detroit, as well as the Postmaster General. It’s too late to save my treasured objects, but maybe it’ll save someone elses. In the meanwhile, the Post Office has permanently lost my business for shipping anything fragile.
Comments