Customer Service - Part Deux

What do you think of when you hear the word "postal"?

Many people think of "going postal" - crazy, in other words. Bringing a gun to work and mowing down everyone who has always ticked you off?

I was working in the Washington Square Building across the street from the post office in Royal Oak, Michigan, when the first "going postal" event occurred. It was a bit scary, not knowing where the gunman would run when we heard he exited the building. This was in November of 1991 - a month that would change our lives forever.

My changes would be irreparable - but that's a different story.

We also tend to think of poor service - like the postal carrier who folded the two paintings a friend sent to me, even though they had "DO NOT BEND" written all over them. Or how someone at the post office in Cincinnati slit open an envelope containing some vintage craft books, helped him/herself to a few, then resealed and labeled it. I know the person who sent these to me . . . she dropped it off at her own post office. No one had their hands on it afterwards except postal employees. I had to fill out federal paperwork to file a complaint!

So, I was NOT surprised when I was tracking my husband's birthday gift package and found it had been sitting at the Saginaw USPS hub, about 7 miles away, for over a week. What DID surprise me was what happened when I called there and spoke to a postal worker, Sharon. She located the paperwork, looked it up in their internal tracking system. Come to find out, it had been on a pallet with 477 other packages, all of which had a delivery date and location. Except mine.

She and two supervisors (Saginaw & Bay City offices) spent over seven hours hunting, manually tracking , and essentially trying their best to locate this one small package. ONE small package. A pallet of 478 total items. They found it (I think it was in our crappy carrier's car). Tim got it one day late.

I think the towing company from two weeks ago could take a pretty decent lesson from the Post Office today! I never thought I would be saying that!

Maybe this is a lesson for me, too, about hope. And jumping to conclusions, based on the past. And having faith that the system is working, the world will fall together as it should, and that there are people out there for whom we should just hold on. It will all work out in the end. And good things are worth waiting for.

I would post a picture of said mug, but it's filled with morning coffee and wandering around a hospital in downtown Saginaw right now . . .