No mail you say?

July 9, 2008 11:47 AM

About 3-4 times a month, no mail is delivered to my building of 5 apartments (7 tenants) is this unusual?

It seems I get less mail than I used to these days. Normally that's a good thing, as junk mail has significantly reduced; sometimes it's a bad thing like when magazines aren't delivered (I've missed ~5 issues in the past year out of 3 subscriptions ~10 issues a year).

However, what really strikes me as odd is that on almost a weekly basis there will be one delivery day that no mail is delivered to the building, a large house with 5 apartments (thus 5 mail boxes) and 7 tenants. The frequency of these no mail days has actually reduced lately and it's now almost on a biweekly basis...but still.

It just seems highly unlikely to me that 7 adults living in the city can so frequently have no mail on the same day.

On those days when no mail is delivered, I can't say whether the mail carrier comes or not. The only mostly reliable way i have to tell is if outgoing mail is picked up, and so far there hasn't been any outgoing mail on a no mail day.

So is this as improbable as it seems to me, or is it strange that i've never encountered this before?

posted by NormandyJack to Grab Bag (21 answers total)

Are those days Sundays?
Do you have a drunk mailman? (I used to and mail was a sporadic, exciting event)
Are your magazines awesome enough to be taken by other people in your building?
posted by rmless at 11:56 AM on July 9, 2008 [3 favorites]

For some reason the mail lady for my girlfriend's apartment will skip their box or not deliver certain pieces of mail. And it's stuff that goes in the box, not packages that are small enough for the regular mail people to deliver.

If you think it's something like that, go up to the post office and ask them why you're mail isn't being delivered.

Have you gotten those issues that you missed? Because you did pay for them, and if you don't get them that's wasted money. I've had good experiences getting replacements for magazines where the cover got torn up but was otherwise readable.

If you're really interested in finding out you could always get together with the other apartments and make sure that at least 1 piece of outgoing mail is there everyday. If it's not picked up, then nobody came by. Or was too lazy to pick it up, which I think is just as bad.

Just covering all my bases here, but this magical no mail day isn't on federal holidays or Sunday or anything, is it? I know you probably know about that already, but I was seriously surprised at the number of people that I go to college with who didn't. So I thought I'd throw that out there.
posted by theichibun at 11:57 AM on July 9, 2008

Yeah, it happens. Jonathan Franzen has a good essay about it in "How to Be Alone," about an extended period of very poor delivery in Chicago.
posted by OmieWise at 12:14 PM on July 9, 2008

We almost never get mail on Tuesday at our house (in Canada, where we don't have Saturday delivery). The way I figure it is thus: mail that's sent locally or just slightly non-locally on Friday is sorted on the weekend and gets here by Monday, and is thus delivered on Monday. Mail that's sent slightly non-locally on Monday doesn't get here by Tuesday, nor does local mail that's mailed later in the day on Monday. And since most business mail isn't likely to be prepared for sending on a Monday morning (or it would actually have been sent out Friday night on the previous business day), there isn't much left to be delivered on Tuesdays. Totally non-local mail (of which there isn't much that we get) can get here at pretty much any time, but there isn't enough of it to really screw up the pattern.

We get the occasional piece of mail on Tuesdays, but relative to other days of the week, it's a tiny amount. If there's a similar delivery pattern happening in your neighbourhood, it could account for the whole building getting nothing on those days.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:19 PM on July 9, 2008

You could start sending daily post cards to yourself. Do it every day for a month, and you'd get to see if 1) you get mail when you have mail and 2) if it's lost forever, or if it eventually gets delivered. And it'll cost less than 10 bucks to send one every day for a month, so it's a pretty cheap way to find out. (And then when you complain to the USPS, you can tell them exactly what the problem is.)
posted by phunniemee at 12:22 PM on July 9, 2008

Response by poster: Hahaha, no this isn't a bad riddle, Sundays won't account for it....I'm not even counting the 4th of July, memorial day or any other holiday. Occasionally I do lose track of federal holidays, but I do eventually realize when that is the reason for no mail.

As for the missed magazines, they were either replaced by the publisher or my subscription was extended. I never dealt with that problem through the post office.
posted by NormandyJack at 12:27 PM on July 9, 2008

I can't vouch for my neighbors (other than noting that no extraneous flyers/catalogs have been dumped on the lobby floor), but I have had both sporadic days of no mail and at least one extended period of no mail (tied to a hold on my mail that ended about 3 weeks after I asked it to). unsurprisingly, I live in Chicago. honestly, I think some days my postal worker just gets overwhelmed with her route and rather than deliver mail too late (I sometimes get it after 7 PM) she just goes home and does the route backwards the next day. mostly I don't really mind - the only time that I felt it was worth complaining about was when my doctoral diploma was sent to my house by registered mail and I got the first and final notices on the same day. that kind of sucked, but I just have important things like that sent to my school address now. oh, and there was the period of about a week where every package sent to me was returned to sender, even though I was getting mail in my box. the mail carrier's excuse was that she buzzed my downstairs neighbor who'd just moved in and who said that I didn't live there, plus she had strep throat that week.
posted by dropkick queen at 12:42 PM on July 9, 2008

Some cities do have terrible mail delivery. Chicago is particularly horrible. Some of my previous jobs involved handling mail, and the mail always showed up late on Mondays, later still if it was coming off a weekend with a federal holiday. Sometimes it'd be after 5 pm. Since we weren't open to receive mail on Saturdays, Monday was always far and away the busiest mail day. This might spill over into residential mail delivery.

I also saw tons of mail issues like random letters addressed to completely unrelated destinations, envelopes that I'd marked "RETURN TO SENDER" coming back to me repeatedly, and a delightful Harry and David fruit basket my mother sent me that showed up at my door about a month late.

It's also a possibility that you have a decent mail carrier, but there are days when he's off or out sick and the substitute can't handle things. If you call the post office they can usually tell you when your approximate delivery time is and if you have a regular carrier.
posted by Metroid Baby at 12:48 PM on July 9, 2008

Do you live in Chicago? When we lived there a couple of years ago, our mail service was unbelievably bad. At one point our mail carrier filled out some kind of "deceased tenant" form on our behalf (God knows why) leading to months of awkward conversations with creditors. Even prior to our "demise" we got mail maybe once a week. Our carrier spent most afternoons at a bar several blocks away, drowning his sorrows, and seemed to feel that the delivery of mail cut into his personal time. It was truly a mess.
posted by BundleOfHers at 1:09 PM on July 9, 2008

Not really an answer but maybe there's another circumstance to it. For instance, I almost never get mail on a rainy day (unless, it seems, I have a magazine arrive that will sit and get soaked through and through.). At my last house, if the regular mail carrier was off I seldom got my mail from the substitute.
posted by horseblind at 1:11 PM on July 9, 2008

We have this problem (Philadelphia). After multiple complaints to the USPS and our building agent, we managed to narrow it down to a) lazy mail person and/or b) substitute carrier who is unfamiliar with the route.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 1:35 PM on July 9, 2008

Here is the other thing, depending on the time of year and overtime budgets postal carriers have to be back at a certain time of day, they get X amount of time and no more in which to deliver the mail, depending on your location in their route they might have to return to the station with your mail and redeliver it tomorrow. Usually there is a junior person delivering your mail at least once or twice a week due to days off, sick days and other reasons, it is very possible that they can't finish the route and are bringing the mail back, especially if you station doesn't have enough staff to send someone out to help them. First class mail often comes back because it does not have a delivery guarantee. If you want something to be carried with all possible dispatch for the lowest price send it priority mail with delivery confirmation, those items are tracked by the postal bigwigs as a metric of efficiency of the particular station.

Are you not getting mail that you expect or are you just not getting mail on certain days?

Delivering the mail is a tough fucking job, not that there aren't lazy mail carriers out there in the hundreds. IANAMC, but I'm cool with a bunch of them.
posted by Divine_Wino at 1:51 PM on July 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

I have a friend who used to be a mailman letter-carrier. He had a few coworkers who would routinely take their day's allottment of mail, shove it in their locker, and go home for the day or hit the golf course or whatever. The next day they'd take two days worth of mail around their route.
I suspect something similar is happening with you.
posted by rocket88 at 1:55 PM on July 9, 2008 [2 favorites]

Welcome to Chicago!

I used to regularly get random pieces of mail. Its a lot better at my current residence, but it still happens here. The address on the mail could be blocks or even miles away.

We have random slow days where nothing comes in. Some items never come in. I had to cancel gamefly because they couldnt make it to my place sometimes. I figure its a clog somewhere in the chain. I just have important things sent to work.

That said, mail logistics is pretty incredible stuff and if your post office is a bunch of slackers like ours is then things like this will happen.

When it gets bad (like with gamefly games being missing) I fill out a complaint card. Not sure if it helps but mail has been pretty good lately.
posted by damn dirty ape at 2:33 PM on July 9, 2008

Also, your carrier may be delivering the mail but someone may be stealing it for identity fraud. You can report stolen mail here.
posted by damn dirty ape at 2:38 PM on July 9, 2008

Consider the possibility that, with a building that large, on days when there is very little mail (or just junk mail, which does not need to be timely) for the building your postman may skip your building until the following day when additional pieces arrive, to make things a little more efficient (one building skipped means almost nothing, but skipping 30 buildings in a day in this fashion certainly does.) If so, this would be unrelated to your missing magazines.
posted by davejay at 2:58 PM on July 9, 2008

I have a friend who used to be a mailman letter-carrier. He had a few coworkers who would routinely take their day's allottment of mail, shove it in their locker, and go home for the day or hit the golf course or whatever. The next day they'd take two days worth of mail around their route.
I suspect something similar is happening with you.

Mail carriers have to scan at various points along their route nowadays, you know that little device they carry to scan delivery confirmations and registered letters? There are bar codes along their route that they have to scan. This is not to say that there are not ways for carriers to get over, there are many, but that one doesn't work anymore. Call the local post office or speak to your regular carrier if you want to start finding out what's going on. Also, yes you might have to have a big stinkin fight with them to get anything done.
posted by Divine_Wino at 4:03 PM on July 9, 2008

Another Chicago sob story-- also have sporadic mail delivery, not as bad as your story, but at least once, usually twice a month or more we will have a day (or days) with no mail--not even the garbage that my neighbors are getting (yes, I sometimes check my neighbor's mailbox just to see if she got mail.)

The explanation given me by the PO was that if it's not the regular mail carrier delivery will get interrupted, sometimes because instead of putting a sub on the route, they just add the route to someone's existing route and there simply isn't time to deliver all the mail (I'm not kidding). Plus, when there is someone else on the route our mail regularly goes astray (and sometimes we find out and sometimes we find out when the power company calls to ask why we haven't paid the bill that we never got). We also get mail for people living at marginally similar addresses in other parts of the city.

Because the sub just can't handle it.

Well, it's the City that Works, but I guess City Hall don't run the Post Office. Anyway, sounds like you have a more serious version of this phenom going. Call the post office and ask.
posted by nax at 5:52 PM on July 9, 2008

Another thing to think about, I had a lot of trouble getting my mail delivered when I lived in an apartment "G" in a building that also had a "6". I imagine "A" and "4" or "1" and "I", etc. might have similar difficulties. Something like that might explain your missing magazines, if not your no-mail days.
posted by Jahaza at 5:54 PM on July 9, 2008

Call your congress[man/woman]'s office.

We used to go days without mail. [Chicago uptown post office]. One phone call to the US rep's office and it was all "Sir! Yes Sir!" ever since. Some days we would get two deliveries. The only annoyance was frequent obsequious calls from the postal customer service people checking to make sure it still worked. I don't know what the rep's office told them, but it worked.
posted by mrbugsentry at 6:41 PM on July 9, 2008

Does it help to have a PO Box or a box at a place like Mailboxes Etc. in Chicago? Is delivery more reliable?
posted by Bunglegirl at 7:09 PM on July 9, 2008