The United States Postal Service is a 'sunny day friend'. There for you when days are bright and trouble is out of sight, but when something goes wrong they want none of it. They have managed to lose a package with a one of a kind item bound to a customer between New York City and Morristown NJ (some 35 miles) with tracking/delivery confirmation paid for. It's now been 15 days since I sent the package, that was shown as delivered on day later and then the following day shown as "Undeliverable return to sender" on the USPS tracking website.
15 days on now, several phone calls to an automated serviced in search of a human, two calls to the morristown nj post office, 2 face to face conversations with postal employees at two different post offices later all anyone has told me is that the other guy has he package and that I should contact them. Two of the three postal employees I have spoken with have taken my phone number with the promise to call me before the day was out, but my phone has not rung, except for my intrepid customer who went to the Morristown NJ post office at which the tracking showed the package to be where he was told it was not there it had been sent back to me in New York.
Have I mentioned that was 12+ days ago. At my local post office where the return address pointed I was told that the parcel was likely at a returned mail facility and that parcel post gets slower handling than other mail there - odd the package I sent was 2 day priority. Everyone is quick to agree that because there is tracking on the package that it should be scanned every time it moves, but seems to find no contradiction in the idea that the package is not where it's tracking says it is but somewhere else. Every postal employee has passed the buck and refused to own the problem.
The punch line of this story is, the US Post Office owns the domain LostInTheMail.com. I found this out because I wondered if there was any sort of watch dog site that I could go to and list my tracking number as one that was lost. Some aggregator of dissatisfaction where I could lend my story to what must be thousands of others just like me. Obviously someone needed to build - LostInTheMail.com. Well a quick flick of the browser and there I was, nothing. A quick hop over to godaddy.com turns up it's already owned by the US Postal Service.
