Government in Action

I received a notice from AAA yesterday that payment of the annual membership fee was past due. Careful research revealed that I had never received a bill for that fee, so I will trot myself down to their office today and pay it. But it raises a point.

Why have I not received a bill for the annual fee?

A couple of years ago I began noticing that I did not always get a monthly bank statement. That was about the same time that I got into a discussion with one of my providers, I think it was the cable company, about a late charge and realized it was incurred because I had not received a monthly bill and had failed to notice its absence. Given my record of on-time payments, as I recall, they were nice enough to waive the late charge.

I also realized that I was receiving quite a lot of first-class mail in my mailbox that was not addressed to me. In many cases the address was not even similar and some of them were not even in the same neighborhood. I would put a note on the mail and leave it in the box and it would disappear, so I assumed the mailman was picking it up and redelivering it.

The issue came to a head when one such item was simply left in the box and more mail was placed on top of it. I wrote on it in a red felt tip that it was delivered to the wrong address and that it should not be left in the box but should be picked up and redelivered. The mailman came to my door and angrily demanded that I never do such a thing again, that I should put a postit on it instead. When I said something about him giving orders to a customer he profanely told me that I was not his customer.

I went to the post office and spoke to the postmaster at the branch responsible for my address. I described to him the problem with mail being delivered to me that was not mine and that I was rather routinely not receiving mail that was being sent to me. He simply said that I was incorrect. If I was not getting mail it was because it was not sent, that everything sent in the mail was delivered to the addressee. I asked him why someone to whom I owed money would decide not to send me a bill and he said that I would have to ask them that question.

I am not making this up.

I told him that I had asked them and that they claimed they had sent me a bill, and I went on to tell him that I had not received the bill that they claimed to have sent. He remained in denial, insisting that they had not sent the bill.

The USPS, at least in my area, remains a notoriously unreliable method of communication, but there is a problem in that it is illegal to send a letter by any other method. If a provider of goods or services wants to bill me they can be prosecuted if they send their bill by any physical method other than USPS, so I am doing as much business as I can by Internet and email.

I guess this is some slight improvement over the postmaster to whom our neighborhood complained eight years ago. Our mail delivery person was routinely so drunk that he scattered mail on the ground, and he had been observed reading mail and pocketing coupons. The postmaster said that we should just tough it out because the guy was retiring in about a year. Which he did.

I’m not sure his replacement is all that much better.