U.S. Postal Service: salvageable or doomed?

lol like an open-world game where all the doors work

yeah!

what is the staffing/overtime situation

similar to what's been mentioned above: ~60 hr weeks, limited days off, longer routes, not enough carriers / lots of turnover. hard to tell this early on how much of that is artificially created and how much isn't (e.g. # of addresses in my zip code has exploded recently). definitely looks like a hiring blitz locally, but I don't know what normal is.

Good luck, Geof!

thanks!

Yesterday was my birthday, and lo and behold, the package from the UK that I was very worried about arrived, alongside two other packages containing book orders. I was a very happy lad.

I know I've often seemed to have better luck with the USPS than other posters in this thread, but I am feeling particularly positive about them today. 17 days ago, I accidentally dropped an envelope into the slot with no postage on it. I've been waiting ever since for it to pop up in my PO Box (the listed return address). Well, today I received an email from the company I sent it to, acknowledging receipt! Whether it showed up there postage due and they'll hit me with a surcharge for that, I can't say, but I'm fucking amazed that the USPS delivered it with no postage. (I will not be trying this trick again.)

Not the post office, but wow:

Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K

— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022

Damn.

wow

interesting follow-up https://www.lataco.com/union-pacific-theft-police-laid-off/

who could have predicted!! it_is_a_mystery

Re-fund the police?

more like security guards josh in chicago

I guess I was confused by the references to the railroad police force, Union Pacific Police, the Union Pacific Police department, and the picture of someone with "Police" on their police uniform. But ... not police? OK, re-fund the Union Pacific (not) police, then.

well, fun fact! railroad police *are* police with police powers in the state they are in, but they are paid to do so by the railroad on railroad property. and, by federal law, their state police powers transfer to other states as they move or are transferred between states.

relocate the police

josh in chicago there's no hypocrisy or bad faith in, on the one hand, having serious problems with the whole concept of police departments as presently constituted on the other hand, rolling my damn eyes at railroads laying off the people whose job it was to guard their shit and then complaining that everyone is stealing their shit

the union pacific police department, as far as i know, is not called into domestic disputes to brandish their firearms, they do not accost young black men walking home from a friend's house and tell them to empty their pockets, etc etc etc you donut so spare me the easy zing

just the laziest regressive sub-conan gag you could have made and ordinarily i wouldn't respond but i dunno sometimes i just don't feel like letting it slide!

oh i completely missed the point of josh's post!

Train robbery has also been around since forever. Railroads have had their own private 'police' forces, commonly known as 'railroad bulls' since forever, too, but big part of the job has always been to break the heads of anyone attempting to ride the rails for free.

let me Aimless that for you

I do love you all

jeez, take it easy, everyone. if you can't make lazy sub-Conan (?) easy zings about train robberies, then what is ilx even for?

copaganda working on JiC, Manchurian Candidating ILX: 🧵

THREAD. I noticed something fascinating: around the same time in recent days, each major corporate news source began talking about a new crime hysteria: a supposed crisis of theft from the railroad industry. But if you look deeper, something very scary is happening.

— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) January 22, 2022

somehow this whole story ended up on the USPS thread, when its not even about mail theft (which btw is a federal crime)

good thread sic, thank you

yes, thank you, abolish the police now plz

like if the liberal media could maybe just approach anything other than absolutely baby-brained credulity when reporting cop shit

they are just doing their job, upholding hegemony

Good thread, thanks sic.

Also Aimless is right, most railroad bulls are the same as any other numbskull cop. I've been chased by a few in my lifetime, and they suck.

Had a package due to me today, as of about 6 it was out for delivery. But when I checked a bit ago it was suddenly "insufficient address - return to sender". Google tells me that either it was indeed returned to sender, which means I have to contact them and wait god knows how long for it to come back or, as happens sometimes, the carrier was overloaded today and scanned it as such to game the metrics and not have it count against them.

Knowing better than to call the main 1-800 number, I called the local post office this morning. Creeping up on 90 minutes on hold so far. Either still understaffed, or their morale is (understandably) sufficiently low to the point where they just do not give a fuck.

even like.....6 years ago I was having that problem with my post office (where I couldn't get anybody on the phone). gotta imagine now it's multiplied 100 fold nationwide.

I mean, I get it. Things are awful there, not much I can do, but wait. I planned for some hold time, but didn't anticipate needing to book a full business day being on hold.

yeah, sadly "driving down there" seems to be the only option, and then it's waiting in a 2 hour line :/

It's just annoying because a lot of the advice I'm seeing online is to try and contact them ASAP, in my specific situation, because you can sometimes catch them before it gets shipped back. Couldn't go in person today because of work, but I apparently will waste my entire day today on hold and all day tomorrow standing in line. I mean, c'mon, I know it's the USPS and my expectations should be sufficiently lowered, but I would imagine they can't just provide absolutely zero customer support.

Holy shit, hit almost two and a half hours and they hung up on me. This is infuriating.

i feel like I had to call a regional office number when that was happening to me, and when I got in touch with THEM suddenly I got a call not long after. but....that may only have worked for where i live.

Trying again, still on hold for the second time. Probably going to give up, not really feeling like wasting even more time on this, nor does anyone give a shit about my USPS live tweeting experience, lol.

The Senate passed the Postal Reform act, and Biden will sign it.

The Postal Reform bill will place the United States Postal Service on the path toward financial stability by repealing the onerous and financially debilitating pre-funding mandate, ensuring six-day delivery, adding much-needed transparency to postal operations, and maximizing participation in Medicare — a program which the Postal Service and its employees have contributed over $34 billion toward — by enacting prospective Medicare integration. Postal Reform is fair to active and retired postal workers and is a crucial development in the fight to preserve and strengthen the peoples’ Postal Service.

Postal service just got easier to salvage.

that is legitimately great news

Hell yes. Eat my ass, DeJoy.

Thank goodness.

Also, tho, I've had rather decent luck with packages as of recent— knock on wood. Received some books from the UK after 10 days, about the same with a book from the Netherlands, and a tape from California took 3 days, which is...really shocking to me, at this point.

Bought a record from Germany in January and it's still not here, though I don't think they shipped it airmail like they claim to have done. Not expecting to ever see it tbh. All my recent domestic deliveries have been super fast recently, though.

Waiting a few weeks now for a package from Spain, but I really should take this to the Discogs thread on ILM. The fucker didn’t even give me a tracking number!

did he write "Tracking: Deez Nuts"

I sent my sister a birthday card more than a week early and it arrived nearly a month late. They may as well have sat on it for another eleven months until it was timely again.

Wow, incredible news. The pre-funded pension thing has been this deliberate act of sabotage hanging over the service for what, two decades now?

A CD from the Nethherlands took about 10 days to arrive, domestic packages have taken about a week or less -- not bad in general.

Bought a record from Germany in January and it's still not here, though I don't think they shipped it airmail like they claim to have done. Not expecting to ever see it tbh. All my recent domestic deliveries have been super fast recently, though.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Tuesday, March 8, 2022 9:45 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Waiting a few weeks now for a package from Spain, but I really should take this to the Discogs thread on ILM. The fucker didn’t even give me a tracking number!

― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, March 8, 2022 10:15 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I've received a few records from Europe just fine. This might just be an individual seller issue.

Yeah, in my case the seller didn't even tell me it had been shipped until I emailed him and asked. I suspect there might be some bullshit going on, and if I haven't gotten the item in question by the end of this month I'll buy another one from someone else.

Do we have a thread on FedEx? Assholes claimed to have delivered a package to me that never showed up. Gave me a “delivery” notification and everything.