Archives for September 2006

…the postal service, that is.

I received a letter from the “Deutsche Post” [= German Postal Service = GPS] today stating that the certified letter that I had sent to J at the beginning of August had indeed not reached the recipient. What a surprise! It didn’t say anything about the whereabouts of my letter though. I mean, it had a tracking number after all and yet they obviously weren’t able to locate it.

J told me about two weeks ago that he had received a note from USPS asking if he had received the letter. WTF? I mean, would I have sent an inquiry if he had received it? Is this what they call “investigation”? Asking the recipient if he had gotten the letter? I could easily have done that myself [in fact, I did. What do you know!]

So, while “doing its investigations”, the German postal service just kicked back waiting for the note from the USPS stating that J hadn’t received the letter? Wow, I am “amazed” by the effiency of this tracking system…[NOT]!

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the GPS sent me a form to file a claim and that’s what I am going to do. The letter had a value of $325 and that’s what I will get back from them, every penny of it, plus the postage. I didn’t send this damn letter by certified mail for nothing.

Ha, I win, and they lose!

I am going to kill someone. Seriously. It’s probably not going to hit the right [= the responsible] person, but I don’t care at this point. I am so fed up with it. I said it before and I’ll say it again:

The postal service sucks.

Remember when they delivered my package with the wedding invitations to Jon’s parents about a month after our wedding? – although the person at the post office assured me that the package would not take more than a week – two at the most [and I sent it off in March!]. Jon’s parents had to send out replacement cards as wedding invitations, because they didn’t get the actual [= really nice] invitations in time, although I had sent them off 2,5 month in advance!

Then I’ve had problems with letters that I sent or should have received from a pen friend in Berlin. Within the last like 5 months, two of her letters never arrived, a third one got here after two weeks. I mean, seriously. What’s the deal?
I wrote a complaint to the postal service and they basically told me to fuck off that they are really sorry [blabla], but that there is nothing they can do about it because she didn’t send the letters by certified mail. Therefore, there is no way they can track back where the letters got lost.

Ok, so I am a smart girl and I learn from things like that. Jon asked me to send him a letter with some important documents a while ago and I was kind of hesitant because I was worried it’s going to get lost again. But hey, they just told me that a letter which is sent by certified mail has a tracking number and will be scanned and recorded at every postal office that it passes through, plus, Jon has to sign for it on delivery. It shouldn’t be a problem then, right?

So I sent a certified letter to Jon at the beginning of August. August, 8th to be precise. And do you want to have a guess? Right. You got it. The letter never arrived.

I am not overreacting. I told myself to calm down. Think. They said I can track this letter. So I typed the tracking number into the tracking system on the postal service website. “The letter must be stuck somewhere…”, I told myself. However, the only info I got was that the letter was deposited at post office XY on August 8th. [Ahm yeah, well , I know that. Thank you very much.]

So, I filed another complaint with the postal service and received a response that they are investigating the matter. I have yet to hear back from them. This is just ridiculous.

As you can imagine, I am pissed.