Does your mailman pick up your mail?

[sungold123.livejournal.com]

Okay I'm going to sound like a country bumpkin here... but before I lived in Somerville, I lived in the middle-of-nowhere New Hampshire, where if we had outgoing mail, we'd put it in our mailbox and put up the red flag. The mailman would then take said mail and put the flag down. So, I figured if I left my outgoing mail on the little hook below my now-attached-to-the-house mailbox in Ball Square, the mailman would take it. However, I've tried this a number of times now and the mailperson has just left the mail there.

According to the USPS FAQs:

Outgoing mail is picked up:
* For curbside delivery if the flag is up or if there is mail to deliver.
* For door delivery if there is mail to deliver.
* From the outgoing mail slot in a Cluster Box.

Since I receive mail literally every day, it seems like my mail should be picked up. I'm curious to find out what other people's experience with this is...?

Comments

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

Somerville postal service is the worst. When I first moved there, I thought, hey, I'll get mail at home.

Big mistake.

I lived in a building with three apartments. Mail got left on the (unenclosed) porch in a bundle for all three tenants in any sort of weather. Mail addressed to other houses at 51 or 53 whatever street ended up in our bundle. Sometimes, the elastic band was omitted, so the mail got scattered all over the porch.

When mail was actually put into our three boxes, it was jammed in so badly that you couldn't get mail out without ripping it. And it didn't seem to matter which name was on which box; mail got shoved into whichever box was handy.

Oh, I complained. Many, many times. It did no good.

Finally, after about a year of this nonsense. I got a PO Box downtown at Fort Point Station. Problem solved.

I lived in Somerville 9 years. When I moved, I was still getting mail addressed to the previous tenants (and the tenants before them).

Once, I got my neighbour's credit card statement. Good thing I'm not interested in identity theft. It sat in my box because I had the PO Box at this time so I didn't check it every day; I never found out if the person whose bill it was got a late payment fee.

I've lived in three states and one province, in cities and suburban locations. Somerville is the worst mail service I've encountered (and I had to deal with Canada Post!)

[afty.livejournal.com]

You have just described my experience with Somerville mail delivery to a T. Just yesterday we got two pieces of mail for the previous residents, who moved out 2 1/2 years ago. We routinely get mail addressed to X Willow Street when we live at X Banks Street. We sometimes find random strangers' mail tucked into the pages of a magazine we received. It's incredible how bad the postal service is here.

[josephineave.livejournal.com]

If you get mail from 2.5 years ago, then it's beyond the PO's fault. Forwarding orders last for 1 year. It's likely that 1) the recipient never changed an address with that vendor, 2) no one at the address who received a misaddressed piece of mail returned it to sender to correct the problem, 3) it's a nonforwardable piece of mail (catalog or the like) and/or 4) the square root of 37.

It sounds like most of those problems are sorting center problems since most mail ends up in a bundle for each address (that's where all those infernal rubber bands come from). No one reads the address label anymore, just the bar code.