Well, I can’t help you either. I can explain why some of it happens but it shouldn’t happen in the first place.
Up until last year when my regular RR carrier retired she would come cheerfully bombing up the driveway, beeping away and hand us our parcels, now I get a different truck = different driver every other day practically and I get my neighbor’s mail about once a week, or they get my mail and I discover this because it’s been marked up with red ink “not my mail” or suchlike. We have yet to receive last month’s feed bill, DH had to go to the mill and ask for a total and pay it and get a photocopy. Our parcels have been left on rocks at the end of the driveway and soaked because we didn’t see them in time. :mad:
Why it happens. Well, as far as I can tell postal employees get hired off a test that really favors the borderline Asperger’s. They have to memorize about 750 names and addresses that have no relationship to one another because they don’t drive straight down one street and up another, they have to do this winding around stuff to save fuel and be efficient. They also get penalized for being “too slow”. Every year my old carrier at my other house would come down the road in her personal car with her postmaster and they would be timing her route. Literally, with a stop watch. No BS’ing allowed! Not even a wave!
What that boils down to is that they can’t be nice like my old carrier was, or it makes it harder to be thoughtful and pleasant, and some of them (carriers) just aren’t customer service oriented anyway. But, in all fairness, I used to receive the UPS guy at a hardware store when I worked there and you want to talk about tense and impatient - he was it - if I could see him coming around the bend and be waiting on him I was good but if I was waiting on a customer, Oh my, he’d be hopping from foot to foot wiggling his board at me.
If I were you I’d go straight to the Postmaster on Monday, straight to the top, and discuss why your service is being curtailed - that you had to the door service for x number of years, you have a nicely maintained asphalt driveway (if you do) of X length, no gate or dogs or other impediments. If you have a Rural Carrier you may find you have a different one now, like I do. Or your route is not occupied (no “bidholder”) or being broken up by two or three of them because your old carrier is calling in sick a lot or having other issues. Bribery does work for RR carriers but you generally have to wait till Christmas, and if you have multiple people delivering your mail they just aren’t going to have the time, or really, the inclination to divert. Beside, you can’t bribe all of them, or I guess you could but it gets unwieldy.
Also, if you have a different Postmaster or delivery supervisor than before, there may be a different culture of service. Some Postmasters go strictly by the book - no exceptions - which means deliver to the box only. Can’t even hand the mail to a waiting customer, too much potential for liability in terms of potentially handing the mail to some non-authorized person. (Yeah, I know, some non-authorized person can take it out of the box too, but to the best of my knowledge that’s how it’s worded in the DMM, Domestic Mail Manual, which may be online). Finding your legal rights may be hard as some of them are in the union contracts. A Letter Carrier is different than a Rural Carrier Associate and operates under different rules.
Good luck on Monday. And actually you’d be better off to wait till Tuesday to have a talk with the Postmaster because Mondays are generally very busy, your issue might get lost in the sea of other issues.
