USPS sucks, but I love it at the same time lol
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aw snap! I remember that…
I was sure it was lost LOL!
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Clearly it’s frustrating when your parcel is delayed and not delivered when expected. It would be worthwhile reading @TheHelveticaScenario post to help you understand why. Nothing is perfect.
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Since you get a chuckle out of posts like this. Then you should get a chuckle out of this too.
I’m helping take care of my 98 year old Dad and my 88 year old Uncle Jim.
About 2 weeks before my Mom had a stroke last year and Dropped dead. She asked me to ‘keep an eye on your Uncle Jim’. She never really had to ask that. But her request stuck with me even if I didn’t like my Uncle. Fortunately I’ve always enjoyed hanging with my Jim. He worked for the USPS for 40 years. And has shared many Amazing stories the inner workings of the Postal structure. That is one of the reasons I have more often Defended the PO than whined about them.
My local ‘main’ Post Office, before the COVID 19 cranked up, had 100 employees and was handling 1000 packages a week. As of last week, they have 67 active employees and are dealing with 16,000 packages.(plus paper mail and periodical sales adverts). <> So I fully understand they are jammed up pretty good🙀.
But as I also have previously stated, I firmly believe that too many packages and less manpower should obviously affect ‘speed’. But the packages should still get to their destinations accurately, just more Slowly.
The explanation above should not elicit a chuckle.
But the following should>
Without exception. Anytime a package arrives in Los Angeles . The same day or the very next day, the package ends up in San Pedro(my town).
This package is the exception. Remember if you read my timeline. The package went from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles.(30 miles from my house). When it departed, it ended up in New Jersey(2734 miles away). It sat in New Jersey for about 8 days. The updates stated the package arrived in Jew Jersey on June 24th… July 1st… and July 2nd. It left New Jersey and ended up in Los Angeles ‘Again’ on July 8th.
This is the first time since I have lived at my current address in 1989, that an item has not made it to San Pedro the same or next day. The Supervisor of the San Pedro Office is a friend of mine. I actually provided yoyo supplies for her Grandkids and we talk on the phone. She use to be my mail carrier years ago. My current primary mail carrier is a veteran carrier and calls me Uncle Mo.
Having people look out for me, combined with my Uncle Jim’s’ advice and experience… you think would give me a better ‘idea’, ya think?
Ok… finally, here is the chuckle part>> The package left the Los Angeles Distribution center in Bell Gardens (about 30 miles away, actually less). It says it is traveling ‘within the System’.
My Postal friends has backlines to get faster information. Yet, they can’t pinpoint the location of my item? The update states the item left Bell Gardens yet there is no ‘departure scan’ proving the movement of the package.
So, it is either going to be delivered out of the blue with no update whatsoever?
Or it may be on its way back to Chicago or New Jersey? Lol
Now, there ‘is’ good news.
Even though it is nowhere to be found. At least it seems like it is ‘approximately somewhere’. Which is way better than certainly nowhere.
So, your Honor, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury and the Gallery. My contention is that even when the Postal Service is backed up affecting speed of delivery. The extra load should not affect the accuracy of delivery. My house has been at the same address since 1924.
Ok, chuckle time over…
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Nothing is perfect since 1924 then.
Wait… Nothing is Perfect?
Certainly an Astute observation if there ever was one.
Taking that piece of golden information and injecting it into the Mix, certainly gives a much clearer view of this pending situation.
There is no such thing as too much good information.
Thank you. I really mean that…
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No you don’t. But we’re all pleased that your packages are accounted for.
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I totally agree production may be impacted by too much demand, but quality does not have to suffer. It seems trying to hard to meet demand is the downfall in quality in many industries.
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No you’re not.
But then again, I am very encouraged by your statement> “We’re all pleased that your packages are accounted for”.
Since you are speaking for everybody. That means you obviously ‘know everybody’.
And if you ‘know everybody’.
Then you must know the person that has my package? Since he is a member of everybody🤔
So… where is my toy?
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You misunderstood the figurative. Your toy will be with you soon.
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I understand that.
I was/am just sharing my Epic Saga.
By now, most of the regulars on this Forum know I am full of stories and sometimes full of something else.
They know that nobody is twisting their arms and forcing them to read my long winded adventures.
They know that I often see things at different angles. And they know that their views may certainly differ from mine.
And yet, when I am being serious. People think I am trying to be funny. And when I am clowning around. People think I am trying to be serious.
We All have adventures to share. But most folks decline to share their amazing misadventures.
When I add some adventure to the forum. I know before I hit ‘enter’ that no matter what I say. Somebody isn’t gonna like it.
This isn’t a popularity contest.
It is just a forum and I like telling stories. Don’t try to read too much into my intentions.
…I think my package is going to arrive without any further site updates. It will just appear.
My major concern is something I don’t think I mentioned yet.
In the past 6 months, my packages have ended up at neighbors houses. About 8 that I can remember… maybe 9?
But in All those instances, the updates said, ‘package delivered’. So I knew immediately to walk up and down the block until I found which neighbor had my mail🤓
One package was even hidden behind a plant pot at the house right next door to me. It was found a week later when the neighbors came back from a trip to Italy🤡
The reason this one concerns me is simple. With zero updates on location. If the package is delivered. It might not even update to ‘delivered’ status. In which case, I will not have a clue it was even delivered anywhere? Often I have found that ‘time’ is important in sorting out the facts.
Earlier today I dropped by my Dads house(6 blocks away). As I walked up to his porch I noticed a Priority box on his steps. His address is 1332 west 3rd street. The address on the box was 1438 West 3rd Street.
So I all of a sudden become the mailman because the box said ‘medical supplies/time sensitive’.
Now, how in the world can you set a package down at 1332 when the address destination is 1438?
Like I already said… More packages to deliver should affect Speed’. But it should not affect ‘accuracy’.
Amazing…
Oh… please don’t let me forget to add in the Porch Pirates over here in my neck of the woods.
They just walk right up the steps, look right in to the ring camera, smile and walk off with the goods. Everybody wears masks now. Giving the thieves more opportunities to not be identified. Cool advantage to wearing masks, ya think?
So I like to be able to follow shipments so I have the greatest chance of being the final ‘recipient’(also wearing my mask, lol).
At the moment, my mystery continues…
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But hopefully resolved soon.
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I don’t mean to be discourteous, but you’re just mad at a system you honestly don’t understand as demonstrated by your statements.
You’re making numerous invalid assumptions based on silly anecdotes about how you believe the USPS delivery network should work without any firsthand knowledge beyond your tiny sample size. My original post fairly exhaustively listed out points of failure some of which may have gone over your head – specifically computers, how they work and how they don’t. It’s very likely the issue you are seeing is related to a mistake a person has made, a mistake a machine has made, or a mistake a computer has made. I could easily give you 20 perfectly valid reasons to explain each point of confusion you’ve listed, but to save time I’ll provide one.
Did you stop and think, what if the Apache Kafka stream tied to a specific sorting machine went down due to misconfiguration in Zookeeper or maybe an admin forgot to properly whitelist an outgoing IP address during an out-of-band emergency maintenance event due to a power outage causing it to lose connection to the AWS EC2 cluster in charge of updating tracking and routing information? And now when the connection is reestablished hours later – because the on-call support tech had to track down the correct login credentials to fix his account’s permissions in order to manually bring the system up because CloudWatch failed and Kubernetes didn’t scale as intended – the message offsets have moved so far along that the messages in the FIFO queue dropped off because the message limit was reached either due a cap size or the max space limit being hit.
Should we halt the mail until the data can be reprocessed? Can you imagine what that time delay ramifications would be to the T.R.I.P.S panels downstream? Who is going to eat that cost? Should we bring back the mail on the trucks that left 30 minutes ago to rescan it? What about the mail on the planes? Are the packages even going to the right place now? What should we do??!?!
Since you’re clearly the expert here, do you think this would mess up “accuracy” (as you call it), just slow things down, or neither, or both? Or was it a lot of jargon you quite frankly don’t have the foggiest understanding of? Maybe ask Uncle Jim who worked there for 40 years. I’m sure he’ll know the answer!
Here’s the bottom line: the continual delivery of mail on the scale that the USPS has to deal with is a tremendous effort. USPS is doing the best they can given the challenges and conditions they have to work within. They are not trying to screw you over personally. They really do want your package to get you to in as little time as possible. Let the system work. Your package will get to you – it may require patience you don’t have.
It sure would be refreshing to hear once in a while, "Wow, it sure is amazing that USPS handles almost half the world’s mail and yet well over 99% of all mail is delivered flawlessly every single day. Nice job, USPS!"
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had no idea usps had that extensive of a tech stack using kafka and ec2 (and k8s!) but i guess i had never really thought about it, it makes sense the more i do. are there any tech talks usps has given about their stack? I think it’d extremely interesting.
Oh a reply from mr USPS himself, we are grateful. I think that the fact of the matter right now is that many people are having problems with package deliveries, and the tracking, kind of shows things are a joke right now. Apparently there is some sort of logistical issue that needs to be addressed, and understaffing is just another problem. Everyone’s tracking (mine included) have far more often these days than ever been ping ponging across the country.
Im not sure why you feel that the USPS is beyond criticism.
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But we’re also the people who are using USPS much more frequently than most, so we’re more likely to encounter any of the issues that are there. I would say it’s far from a joke, 99% of my packages arrive without any sort of issue, that’s over 15 years of extensively using it and over 12 different addresses.
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I don’t. I think you’re just being unreasonable.
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Are there any circumstances that may cause issues with logistics currently?
EDIT - poor grammar.
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Why try to validate your position by trying to insult my intelligence?
Did I say I was the ‘expert’ here?
No… you did.
I made it very clear that I was sharing a story of my epic saga. I never said I was an expert on the Postal Service. And I never said my story was extracted from the Bible.
I spent decades giving lectures on Effective Communication for Productive Results.
And now all these years later. Because you have extensive experience on the inner workings of the Postal Service. I haven’t the foggiest idea of what is going on?
I Never said I ‘HAD’ the foggiest idea of what is going on?
If I knew exactly what ‘was’ going on, I most likely would not have shared my Epic Saga.
It is a story.
If… I was an expert on the subject. I could identify the solution myself without your arrogant diatribe.
If you know so damn much; where is my friggin package, genius?
Think of it this way. Every single bit of massive experience you have gained over years of USPS duty. And the most you can do for me is to insult my intelligence simply because I don’t have the same Amazing knowledge that you boast about.
Anything actually constructive you want to say?
I am a Structural Welder, Professional Car Painter and Machinist. I have Never told anybody I wrote the Handbook for Postal Operations.
You know your job better than I do? Good for you.
I told a story. Where did I say that you had to like it?
Where do you state that what you know is going to help find my package?
Obviously my story highlights that I don’t know about the same percentage as what I do know.
Questioning my ability to grasp the situation does absolutely nothing to find out where my item is.
I am glad though, regardless. That you chimed In To let me know how Sharp you are on the subject of USPS inner workings.
Because it reinforces in my mind that even though the Huge system is the 3rd largest employer in the Country. And even considering they are sophisticated enough to assume the task of handling 48 percent of the mail for the entire planet Earth. Even with geniuses like you on board.
That it has taken over 2 months to yet get my package to me.
Your input has cleared My foggy mind.
Thank you
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