Anybody got any US Postal Service "horror" stories?

How about any "miracle" stories about the US Postal Service? USPS has employees who are heroes and save customers lives nearly every day. We also find lost things like an envelope full of money and return it to the sender intact. All package delivery companies have instances where they lost a package, USPS doesn't hold the prize for this. Yes, I work for the Postal Service and I am proud of it. I hate negative stories about the Postal Service and I hate the term "going postal."

Was in the military.Got a plastic bag with bits and pieces of the envelope a letter had been in.Sorry they said,letter was destoryed in mailing.Found out later that it was the letter telling me i was going to have a son.

my friend just mailed all his graduation thank you cards and the postal service truck that carried them crashed and caught fire which burned all his cards so he had to do them all over again haha

Yeah, while I was delivering mail, a customer's medium sized dog jumped against a large plate glass window which shattered, raining glass down over me. Three tendons in my left wrist were severed. After surgery to repair the damage, and subsequent return to work (three days later) I was reprimanded for not noticing the proximity of the customer's couch to the window, and not realizing the potential for the dog to jump up on it and shatter the window. My bad. +3

A few here and there.
1. Once they lost a telescope I returned by mail. I put a tracer, but they never did find it. I lost $400.
2. When I went out of town for a month and then returned, they lost my mail for the next two weeks and told me it was on a loop roaming around somewhere.
3. They lost some of my paintings I had mailed to an exhibit. Finally, they did find them, but the exhibit was over and my paintings weren't exhibited.
4. The postmaster hates me because he has a hard time fixing the problems I have with the post office, but I have never been rude to him. I exasperate him to no end.

No, I don't. I mail a lot of packages and have very rarely had any problems at all. Sure, sometimes things go wrong within the USPS, but if you think of the overwhelming amount of mail they deal with everyday, the success rate is pretty impressive.

Apologies for this being a UK story; I posted a £50 item which never arrived, I got an apology and a book of about 6 stamps! Cheapskate or what!

I don't have any "horror" stories, but they did lose a $30 radio once. (I recovered my $30).

My mailman broke the mailbox at least three times on purpose. UPS "lost" a box of clothing, soap, lotion, shoes, food, and other various items my aunt sent to us. The box that she sent the stuff in had a another box inside (a box in a box) and inside that box were some muscle builders (pills and tablets). They said they would find our items. That was four months ago.

I HATE UPS!

I once bought something hat was shipped by mail and never arrived. The seller eventually sent me a replacement.

5 years later, I got the original package, stamped "found in equipment believed to be empty".

worst part is that this happens often enough that they actually have a rubber stamp for it.

I find the USPS reliable for sending standard letters from Australia to the United States and vice versa and I have never had one problem and I hope it stays that way thank you :)

danielcboyer-- no, not a police state, a managerial state. Everything is managed by a faceless bureaucracy that is accountable to someone's standards, usually not the end-user's. My story is this. After mailing hundreds of parcels around the US and globally over many years, in the last month I've started a mail order business and all of a sudden amazing problems developed that never came up before. One package + contents completely destroyed-- the recipient sent me photos of a crushed box with tire marks on it! Another was a rather stout cardboard container that was damaged and the contents badly damaged. They always say "nothing we can do without insurance". When I asked about particulars regarding insurance, they said they have appraisers to settle claims. But the person helping me, who barely spoke English it seemed, said they want receipts to prove value. I said what if the receipts are for paint and canvass, or metal for a sculpture? Are you telling me a finished work of art has only the value of the original materials? Or a $2 toy that you got as a kid is now worth quite a bit more-- no receipt obviously so how to establish value? She was flummoxed. I think it is a ruse to get you to buy insurance and then they may be a little more careful with the parcel. All-in-all the USPS does OK considering their workload but that is no excuse for bad or rude service. They seem often very defensive about the slightest thing. So they have to deal with rude customers all day? That is their job and they need to buck up or get better training. The really small post offices are best.

i dated a mailman once - he was weird - flashback veteran, sexual pervert, mama's boy

today is 30 sept 2008 and i just got an email from a friend whose parents live in a small village in england. my husband sent them a postcard from hawaii in 1988 and they just received it last saturday! wow! crazy.

I have had an ongoing USPS horror story for the past 14 years. The USPS has delivered about 20% (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) of my legibly and fully-paid letters back to me, sometimes slitting them open and mailing them back in a larger envelope. All my complaints have fallen on deaf ears, with the emtpy promises and unbelievable claims of ignorance of the local PO to "investigate" alternating with threats to call the police by window clerks when I dare to complain. Many of the postcards I mailed to promote the opening of my show "Love and Loneliness" at Omphale Gallery in Calumet, MI in August last year were returned to the gallery when they were clearly addressed to others, which had a negative impact on attendance and possibly sales. When I dared to politely and in a normal voice bring this up with the carrier he swore at me, and the window clerk refused to talk to me. The postmaster was pointless to talk to as he had previously been postmaster in Houghton and had threatened me for daring to complain about my mail being delivered, and supervisors have insulted me when I tried to bring this up. The USPS's online complaint system has likewise proved a useless method for giving me the runaround, with every complaint being met with claims of ignorance and every promise to investigate, getting me, at most, a phone call from someone else who claims ignorance. I guess this is what you can expect when living in a police state, however.

i wen't to massachusetts and i left a library book there so they sent it back but it got lost in the mail so i had to pay $20 to replace it

Thanks Oryx. You just never know when you mail pkgs these days. My daughter & family live in CA & I live in NC, so I send quite a few pkgs myself. One Christmas my daughter called & said "I hope you have the recp't for the GPS you sent, because we got the box w/the presents, but we only got the GPS's box & all the accessories, but not the GPS itself. The box had been broken & taped" Well, guess what - I never even sent them a GPS!! I have often wondered who else's Christmas was ruined.