My local post office has stopped delivering my mail after my unionized mail(wo)man claimed my puppy “threatened” her. I was informed that the only way to get my mail is to go to the post office and “sign a statement assuring us you will keep your dog restrained during normal delivery hours.” Those of you who know me won’t be surprised by my response…
October 4, 2007
Betti Smith
Supervisor Customer Services
1111 S. Roop Street 89701Dear Ms. Smith,
I am writing in response to a letter I received from you today dated October 1, 2007, in which you state you were unable to deliver mail to my home recently because my “unrestrained dog threatened (y)our letter carrier.” You add that you believe my dog “might have a propensity to attack and to bite or otherwise injure” your union-represented employee.
I have to say this is pure, unadulterated bull… Well, you know.
We own two dogs. Both are house dogs. And we have a fenced yard. We do NOT allow our dogs to run around the neighborhood unrestrained and/or unsupervised - during your carrier’s delivery hours or any other time.
That being said, I am very familiar with the incident your carrier reported to you recently because we were loading our kids and our dogs into the van for a trip to the playground, coincidentally, at the time your mail(wo)man approached our home. Though unleashed at the time, the dogs were completely under our control as they were merrily hopping into the van.
If your employee claims our dogs “threatened” her, I’d have to…how to put this as gently as possible?…respectfully request that she be hooked up to a polygraph machine and ask her to repeat the accusation.
We’ve had our oldest dog for over 10 years now. We have three children: 7, 5 and 1. If I thought or had ever been given any indication that the dog was “threatening” to my children in any way, she’d have been out of here in a New York minute.
The fact is, we’ve never had a problem with this dog in more than a decade with people of any kind…including kids, neighbors, the UPS man, the FedEx driver, the pizza delivery dude, the florist and our mailman (or letter carrier or whatever the politically correct term is these days).
Our other dog is a mere puppy which could only be even mildly considered “threatening” if you’re afraid of being thrashed by a wagging tail.
Come to think of it, considering all of the postal employees in recent years who have gone on so many killing rampages that they actually invented the phrase “going postal” to describe crazed killers, maybe I’M the one who should feel threatened every time I see a letter carrier walking unrestrained down the street reaching into his or her mailbag.
This is not to diminish or make light of the very real danger mailmen and mailwomen are occasionally exposed to by truly vicious dogs who roam neighborhoods completely out of the control of their owners. But this is NOT the case in our case, and I deeply resent the implication and accusation by your carrier who maintains otherwise.
I accept that your employee may be scared of dogs - or pictures of dogs, or stuffed dogs, or even hotdogs. But neither of my dogs “threatened” her in the incident you describe. Period. And I invite you to come to my home and see the dogs for yourself.
That fact is, I’ve been a responsible dog owner for almost 20 years now, and this lone carrier is the ONLY person on the planet who has ever expressed any fear of any of my dogs. I suggest that she is, at the least, exaggerating the situation and making a mountain out of a molehill.
That being said, you do what you have to do. It’s not like I have any alternative to the post office, right? I’m a captive “customer.” It’s not like there’s a competitor I can go deal with, so stick it to me. Stop delivering my mail and force me to get a PO box thanks to your employee’s dogophobia. It’s just the sort of “service” the public has come to expect from USPS anyway.
Oh, and thank you for raising the cost of my stamps again this year to pay your letter carriers more money and benefits to not deliver my mail. Much appreciated.
Sincerely,
Chuck Muth
Captive Postal “Customer”P.S. By the way, have you guys gotten around to delivering that Christmas card to my Mom last year yet?
Posted on October 5th, 2007 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: National
Chuck Muth, you hate the USPS!!
I have a solution, why don’t you provide an ‘information box’ outside your residence where “many an entrepreneur is ready, willing and able to hand-carry printed flyers, brochures and other letters to neighborhood residents offering their services or otherwise promoting their businesses on their own, thus saving the cost of using the Postal Service to provide for such distribution.”
Source: Citizen Outreach; 611 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, #439, Washington, D.C.:
Letter to the President’s Commission on the United States Postal Service, requesting change in law [lobbying activity in violation of 501(c)(3) status], dated March 11, 2003
BRAVO!! BRAVO!!!
I wish I had written that letter….good for you….the arrogance of the USPS is mindblowing…….
Oh boy *shakes head*
What a great idea. Get a postal box, and you can leave the junk mail in the post office, where it belongs, for them to deal with. Maybe I need to get a kiiler puppy.
Chuck.
You seem to take pride in being bothered.
Mail-carriers are just like anyone else. They can believe in being bothered or not. My mail has been stopped 3 times now. 1 for a box being in the way which wasn’t. 2 for the shrubs not being trimmed which were. 3 for the car parked too close to the shrubs and not enough room for the carrier to get by. (It’s a classic car which has been in the exact same spot for years.)
Each time I received the notice that they give you I dealt with it without getting bothered . You got bothered chuck just like the carrier believed she was bothered by the dog (at least that was the excuse she used). People who believe in being bothered are following The Lie. You did and she did and my carrier did … but I made a choice not to believe The Lie and be bothered. If i got bother by every person who gets bothered I’d be bothered all the time like you seem to be Chuck. That’s not following truth. That’s following The Lie.
rytlove
CHUCK:
I AGREE WITH YOU 100% PLUS POSTAGE…
MANY OF THESE MAILMAN ARE JUST LOOKING FOR AN EXCUSE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT ANYTHING. AND WHO GIVES A RATS AZZ ABOUT BEING POLITICALLY CORRECT… GOING POSTAL IS A GREAT TERM, AND I FEAR ALL MAILMAN BECAUSE THEY ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE TERRORIST THAN MUSLIMS… OF COURSE ,SOME ARE MUSLIMS, I DO NOT WANT THEM TO DELIVER MY MAIL, I REQUESTED A CATHOLIC OR CHRISTIAN, BUT THE POST OFFICE TOLD ME I CANNOT REQUEST THAT.. OH WELL.. WHATEVER.
Hey Louis, you left out the Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, etc. You got any problem with any of them delivering your mail?
And what about the Mormons? According to Bob Novak, 28% of Americans wouldn’t support a Mormon for the presidency under any circumstances. But the really big question is whether or not you’d let a Mormon deliver your mail?
Get a bigger dog.
I am thinking I have to sick my 17# full grown Labradoodle on the Mail Person - cause I do not want any more mail. All I get is ads and offers for Credit Cards. Three CC offers every day!!! And no bills by paper any more.
I suggest we all STOP for one Year sending Xmas cards. The loss in revenue will end this debacle once and for all.
Your Pvt Letter Carrier in Waiting,
Brad Whitcomb
It’s just an excuse to lighten her load. If she can accuse 5-10 people of having mean dogs than thats less mail she has to case and carry.
Bravo, Chuck! A possibility I’m wondering about - with admittedly no way to confirm: Could this be calculated harassment by your local P.O. because they have you pegged (correctly) as someone actively committed to ending the USPS monopoly?
For fifteen years I lived in an arch-leftwing petri dish calling itself Portland, Oregon, and during that time was a vestigial member of the Conservative Book Club. I’m an objectivist, not a conservative, but occasionally that club would offer an appealing tome on economics or what have you, at an equally-appealing price. So I kept the monthly catalogs coming.
By the time I escaped said petri dish, those CBC mailings - and many other items, political and non-political, were routinely delivered in folded and/or spindled and/or mutilated form. I once received a CBC catalog *shredded and delivered in a plastic baggie” with a note saying “We regret that this item was damaged in our automated mail-handling equipment.”
I had copies of REASON and The Intellectual Activist magazines delivered with large, dirty boot prints on the covers, picked up *registered letters at the P.O. that were torn open* and affixed with a sticker saying “Opened in error,” etc.
In addition to their intolerable monopoly, their Stalin-era service, their ever-increasing rates, their DMV-rude attitudes and occasional homicidal rampages, United States Postal Workers can and do intentionally persecute “customers” who espouse beliefs of which they do not approve. And as you said in your response, we captive “customers” have no alternative to such abuse. Oh, you can file a complaint with the “Postal Inspector” - which is…yet another employee of the USPS, which means that “filing” is literal. The complaint goes into a cabinet (or round file) somewhere and, duty having been dispatched, the USPS grunt goes back to bureaucracy-as-usual.
A separate issue from abuse of “customers” is the reams of junk mail and “Super Saver”-type ads the USPS buries us in daily - every one of us is essentially forced into the role of garbage disposal unit. There have been a number of legislative efforts to “ban” SPAM and other junk email - because email accounts are private. But not a peep about ending the USPS’ practice of forcing their apparently-lucrative ad materials into our faces every day. Collecting that trash, taking it to the P.O. and depositing it back into the outgoing mail slot has become tedious because they’ve caught on to the protest and started covertly printing the address of origin on random pages of the ads.
All of this has to change. As per usual however, not a one of the GOP candidates has said a peep about privatizing the delivery of first class mail and nudging that USPS dinosaur into that beckoning tar pit.
Arrgh. Ok, ’nuff venting, I’m getting indigestion - time to write my politicians. I recommend the practice to all here.
Dear Mr. Muth,
I am a retired letter carrier from Toledo, Ohio. I started carrying the bag in July of 1969 after returning from separation from the US Air Force.
I carried mail in the city ghetto, middle class neighborhoods, and a very wealthy estate area of Toledo; . I was harassed by dogs, drunks, spit upon in saloons where I was required to enter to make a delivery; seen first hand customers who comitted suicide by gun shot; entered a burning , smoke billowing ,apartment building trying to alert residents that the building was burning; passed out welfare checks to people who said they lived in a burned out house and that their crooked case worker said if they stood in front of the house I’d give them their checks; been the victim in seeing a naked lady come to the door to pay her two cents postage due; had my postal jeep vehicle stuck in a snow drift where all four wheels were off the ground; been cursed at by a little old lady because I didn’t know the zip code for Calabassas, California;
and had five surgeries on my knees because of various slips, trips and falls over my 33 year career, but i have NEVER been attacked by a puppy. Stepped in a lot of dog manure over the years, but never attacked by a puppy.
Uh, there is NO monopoly by USPS! You have a choice of how to send your mail. For instance there is, FedEx, UPS and DHL. Too, you can offer to pay the mailing for those that want to send things to you by using any of the above PRIVATE companies. But, if you’re hoping for a 41 cent mailing from any of them, well, forget about that, but that’s okay because the icky government didn’t do anything to help you. Well, aside from the public roads, the airports, the air traffic control system, etc..that helps these private companies get the mail to your door. LOL.
Ryt Love is great!
For those that want off a mailing list go to https://www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailing.
Way to Go! I’m thinking about stopping all USPS deliveries to my house. No PO Box, and No Mail Box. Do you know of any “laws” that require me to have a receptacle for the USPS?
Sorry to break into Southy’s dreamworld, but he is just factually wrong.
If anyone would care to test the theory, they can set up a private company to deliver first-class mail, sell people subscriptions to that delivery service and put up residential boxes for customers right alongside the Stalinist USPS boxes - and then see how long it takes before sheriff’s deputies are at your door to haul you away under force of arms to appear before a court that has the power to lock you in a cage. I figure less than a single calendar week.
That is the ultimate nature of this USPS monopoly. Yes, monopoly. Under United States law no entity other than the USPS is allowed to deliver first class mail. Period, full stop.
“Roads, airports, the air traffic control system” - as well as the airport security Gestapo calling itself Thousands Standing Around; the automobile licensing agency called the DMV; the entire medical regulatory bureacracy in America - to name a tiny fraction of the whole - should be and ultimately will be privatized.
To use those “public” entities as an argument in defense of another just as corrupt, inept and abusive, is to engage in the same childish argument that parents and teachers typically dispel with the question “If Johnny jumped in the lake, would you jump in the lake too?”
But thanks for the tutorial on illogic in debate.
To recap: On the issue of political persecution - the willful, malicious and felonious destruction and/or delay and/or misdirection of mail of people whose politics the USPS Gestapo find objectionable - there remains no recourse short of hiring a private investigator and a team of litigation attorneys.
Should that be necessary in the United States of America? Is this still the United States of America?
The USPS monster must be abolished and dismantled, permanently, the sooner the better. Actually that’s not even needed. All that needs to happen is the aforementioned abolition of the USPS monopoly on first class mail delivery - as has been done successfully in bureaucratic Japan, socialist Britain, even Ahmad-In-A-Jar’s Iranian dictatorship - and the market will handle the task of relegating that dinosaur to its well-deserved place in the belly of the Trash Heap of History.
Write your Congressmen and demand the removal of the first class monopoly today.
T.O.E.,
Thanks for the update! I had no idea that if you stuck a letter in a UPS package and mailed it to someone, the sherrif would arrest me! How DOES UPS, FEDEX and the other stay in business? I mean, I know I have put letters in a box sent UPS to my family, but I didn’t know we all could get arrested!
And then there is my attorney on the East Coast…she sends me legal forms via UPS every time I have legal work done…..who knew we were breaking the law by sending mail without the USPS?!?!?!
Maybe I never used the term ‘first class mail’ when I asked UPS to send something, so they never told me? I just put the letter in their cardboard sleeve and gave it to thme.
Then again, Totally Off the End could wait for the pony express to come around. Hey, if you hate America and the modern world so much, why don’t you try the Sudan, it may seem backward to most of us, but it sounds like you would like to go back to using cattle dung to light your hut.
Southy: The USPS does have a monopoly on first-class mail.
Part of the USPS definition of First-Class is that the item must weigh less than 13 ounces. From my experiences shipping envelopes via UPS or FedEx, I always had to enter a minimum weight of 1 lb into the shipping program, even if the envelope weighed less. That’s probably what disqualifies even the lightest UPS or FedEx shipments from first-class mail status.
Supposedly UPS and FedEx would love to have a situation where every house had a separate parcel box next to the mailbox. It would make UPS and FedEx operations more efficient by saving the drivers the time it takes to walk up to the door of each parcel recipient. The only reason I can think of that no one has installed the additional boxes is that it would be illegal.
TOE: I couldn’t find any documentation on a related issue and was wondering if you could enlighten me. As I recall, back during the Clinton administration the USPS recognized that the growth of email and faxes would eventually threaten the USPS’s monopoly by reducing the volume of first class letters. I thought the USPS’s response to this was that they wanted to either set up their own fax kiosks and their own email programs so they could charge for faxes and email messages, or that they were going to push a new tax thru Congress forcing people to pay a fee to the feds every time they emailed or faxed something. Do you remember if the USPS actually floated these proposals, or is my memory playing games with me?
Building your own custom mailbox for your dream home? Don’t dare violate the Federally required specifications. Like standing in line to buy stamps, envelopes at Office Depot, being charged a late that is a higher amount than the balance that was due on your credit card? Like paying a premium for next day delivery when buying necessary medication for your seriously ill pet and being told by the letter carrier on the next street that your commercial mail is not being delivered because you carrier is on jury duty, but that the other carriers will try to deliver 20% of his mail when they are done with their own routes? YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE A VICTIM LIKE I HAVE BEEN! I never buy anything where I don’t have a choice of delivery other than USPS. Your bank likely has online banking for FREE with a delivery guarantee. You get a confirmation number. No stamps, no envelopes, no writing checks, no late fees, or financial liability for Post Office failure to deliver on time, it’s guaranteed by your bank. It’s called progress and technology. That’s why the technology was created, to solve a problem, promote new customers, grow the banks business with new, innovative,competitive services. I recently represented a neighbor’s Pug in a dog bite case. Allegedly bit a temporary carrier. When I subpoenaed the medical records that were the alleged damages, there were none. I found the regular carrier who was in disbelief of the incident. She described a situation where the dog once or twice was not restrained and walked the route with her until she ordered him “go home” which he did. She told me the dog “Is very sweet and I felt comfortable having him walk the route with me.” I don’t understand where this comes from. At the hearing the Postal Inspector informed me that they would no longer deliver mail to the home. I negotiated a “sidewalk” mail box, and they reconsidered. (I guess they didn’t believe a real injury occurred, nor wanted to lose the business.) We won the hearing. I appealed the decision. Under California Law a dog declared as a viscious, or potentially dangerous dog can cause your homeowner insurance to be cancelled and allows the City or County to order your dog destroyed. The evidence in this case did not support the conclusions in the City’s judgment. The City did not wish to hold another public as is legally required so I agreed to meet them in private and discuss the reasons for the appeal. They changed the wording. These kinds of cases have very important legal implications. CHUCK, YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER APPREHENSION BY ANYONE INCLUDING A LETTER CARRIER. IF YOUR PUPPY NEVER SNAPPED, BIT, OR EVEN WENT NEAR THE CARRIER WHILE UNRESTRAINED YOU NEED TO MAKE A BIGGER DEAL OUT OF THIS THAN IT ALREADY HAS BECOME. Perhaps the carrier was freaked out because your flag was at half mast over Memorial Day. Half mast at the post office means they are hiring. Perhaps a very courteous letter, that makes inquiries as to more specific facts, (while creating an express record for later), to determine what if any damages the carrier is claiming, ask for internal post office documents, telephone pad notes between supervisors, copies of written communications that deal with this event or any alleged injuries that may be alleged as a result of that event, copies of advice from the postal department describing their legal theories as to why those injuries are compensable, non-compensable, etc. Have you been asked to attend a County or City administrative hearing, or do you expect to? You have to exhaust all administrative remedies before proceeding. The beauty of that is that if a County or City holds a public administrative hearing, your discovery will be easier under most state statutes that require disclosure of public information. The FOIA is much more difficult to enforce. You could have some fun with this as long as you continue to “live the lie”. This should bother you unless your dog did snap, bite, or have physical contact with the postal carrier. As long as no physical contact occurred, you are safe with respect to your homeowner insurance, claims from the carrier, and the threat of having your mail discontinued under the USPS statutory authority. So Chuck, here is the most crucial question of your life. Do you want to be the Fed Ex poster boy while giving your personal summation of why you would never use the USPS again?
There can only be qualified answer, there cannot be a flat out yes or no. The right answer is, “Paid, Hell Yes”.
Chuck, I don’t know what kind of dog/puppy you have, but a few years ago, I had mail delivered with a notation on the top that it was mail from the day before that they couldn’t deliver because of my dog was in the yard. My dog was a Maltese. My dog thought everyone that came anywhere near my house was there to see him. He never barked, he would just wag his tail and get close to be petted. Wow, no wonder these union-protected employees go postal!
I don’t want to be improper here, but I have to ask…
Chuck, are you sure she wasn’t feeling threatened by you? Have you checked to see if she’s on your email list?
I know your dogs. They’re quite gentle. You and your writings, however…