Another USPS question

Pete1977

Pete1977

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I filed for a change of address on March 30 and specified it to take effect on April 10. However, on Friday, March 31, my mail box was blocked with a gray plastic sheet, which I took to mean that it was no longer being used, and confirmed yesterday with my postman.

Today, Sawyer Cutlery calls me and tells me that the package they sent on thursday USPS Priority was being returned as undeliverable (apparently it wasn't forwarded to the new address). Sawyer is in Hingham MA and I'm in Gloucester (1 day by priority or first class). He was kind enough to ship another knife UPS to my current address and will just accept the returned to sender when it gets there.

I'm quite annoyed at this because now I am wondering will I get ANY forwarded mail at the new address (only a mile and a half from my current address) and it is IMPERATIVE that I do, being tax season and all.

I tried calling the post office, but I can't get MY post office, and I just sent an email through USPS.com.

My questions- Why, if they have a forwarding address, would they return the package as undeliverable?

Why would they stop my mail to my current address eleven days earlier than I specified?

How long is it going to take to straighten this all out?

any ideas?

thanks

pete
 
Somewhere on the postal site is a pull down or search for your local PO phone number.

I have had similar things happen, basically no one reads the date, they just put it through. The best thing to do is talk to your local delivery person.
 
Go to http://www.usps.com and find LOCATE A POST OFFICE right on the topmost bar of links. Click on it then enter your post office name and ZIP code and it will give you address, hours of operation, local phone number, etc.
 
DaveH said:
Somewhere on the postal site is a pull down or search for your local PO phone number.

I have had similar things happen, basically no one reads the date, they just put it through. The best thing to do is talk to your local delivery person.
Click to expand...

I talked to him yesterday and he said that I probably put the date in incorrectly. I am quite sure I put in the right date for the address change, but I didn't want to argue the point with him. I'll go to the post office and speak to the post master tomorrow.

mycroftt said:
Go to http://www.usps.com and find LOCATE A POST OFFICE right on the topmost bar of links. Click on it then enter your post office name and ZIP code and it will give you address, hours of operation, local phone number, etc.
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mycroftt- I did that on friday, but the number for my post office is 800 ASK USPS which is not a direct line to my particular post office. they have a fax number that is a local exchange but no phone number.
 
Forwarding mail is probably the single most important job that the Postal Service cannot do properly.

You submit a Change of Address order.
Your letter carrier notes it on a form he keeps at his work station.
He begins sending your mail to a centralized forwarding site.
It gets a yellow sticker with the new address.
It gets sent to the new address.

However ...

What if your letter carrier simply begins forwarding ahead of time? What if your regular carrier isn't on duty due to a day off or leave? The replacement may send your mail for forwarding before the start date. What if packages at your post office are delivered by a parcel post unit rather than the regular carrier? What if the centralized forwarding site enters your data incorrectly?

It isn't always possible, but the safest way to get mail to a new address is to notify your correspondents ASAP and avoid the Postal Service's system as best as you can.
 
gee thanks for telling me now Esav :rolleyes: :D

j/k. I actually use that address for most of my important mail, and only my car loan and health insurance actually comes to this address. oh and my benchmade NRA Gaucho :grumpy:

anyhow, Sawyer Cutlery went out of their way to send another UPS today and will just accept the priority package that was returned as undeliverable. thanks guys. I'll change the auto loan and the health insurance addresses in the morning. all my tax stuff and other bills go to my parents' address anyhow. (No I'm not a mommas boy, just semi nomadic :D)
 
My sister kept a post office box for years, as she was moving around the area a lot, and could always get there every few days or few weeks. :)
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Forwarding mail is probably the single most important job that the Postal Service cannot do properly.

You submit a Change of Address order.
Your letter carrier notes it on a form he keeps at his work station.
He begins sending your mail to a centralized forwarding site.
It gets a yellow sticker with the new address.
It gets sent to the new address.

However ...

What if your letter carrier simply begins forwarding ahead of time? What if your regular carrier isn't on duty due to a day off or leave? The replacement may send your mail for forwarding before the start date. What if packages at your post office are delivered by a parcel post unit rather than the regular carrier? What if the centralized forwarding site enters your data incorrectly?

It isn't always possible, but the safest way to get mail to a new address is to notify your correspondents ASAP and avoid the Postal Service's system as best as you can.
Click to expand...

That process will become obsolete some time this year. The change of address forms (3575 and 3546) will no longer be addressed to the post office of the original address, so the local letter carrier will not have a lot of advance notice. The COA forms will not be addressed at all, in fact, at least not in a human readable way; instead they will have an Intelligent Mail (how's that for a new oxymoron?) barcode (a.k.a. four-state barcode - kind of an enhanced POSTNET barcode), that will cause them to be directed to the nearest scanning site (usually a processing plant or CFS unit) where they will be scanned on a PARS processor and the image will be resolved by the CIOSS OCR capability and the forwarding order will be stored in the national change of address database. Much of the mail addressed to that address will then, after the effective date of the order, be picked off in the mailstream and rerouted without ever going to the delivery unit of the original address.

The carrier will become the last one to know, being notified of the pending order a week or so in advance in order to apply a reality check, e.g. the bad boys at the high school might be trying to have their history teacher's mail forwarded to the White House again. He will be able to reject the change and reverse the entire process if necessary, but he won't see much of the mail coming through with the original address.
 
Great idea, in the works for about 20 years now. Who puts this barcode on mail that doesn't go through the OCR?
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Great idea, in the works for about 20 years now. Who puts this barcode on mail that doesn't go through the OCR?
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The barcode will be preprinted on all the COA cards. OCR's will not be able to apply them because there will be no street, city, or ZIP code info in the address block. It will be the same on all of them nationwide and will represent a non-existent ZIP code (maybe something like 00311) that will be included in every sort plan on every piece of mail processing equipment (MPE), causing them to drop in a dedicated COA bin. Then they are physically routed to the nearest scanning unit. The pieces that can't run on MPE for whatever reason - ripped, obscured barcode, just happened to fall on the floor, etc., will have to rely on some kind of knowlege on the parts of the people running and overseeing the operations, i.e. "What the hell do we do with this?" "I dunno, just put it in the tray with all the other ones that look just like it."
 
the forwarding order will be stored in the national change of address database. Much of the mail addressed to that address will then, after the effective date of the order, be picked off in the mailstream and rerouted without ever going to the delivery unit of the original address.
Click to expand...

Once the order is on file with this national change of address database, any mail to be forwarded that goes through an OCR will be routed to the new address rather than the old. It may have to be routed to a computer forwarding site for a new address label.

What about mail that doesn't go through an OCR? That's still subject to manual forwarding.
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Once the order is on file with this national change of address database, any mail to be forwarded that goes through an OCR will be routed to the new address rather than the old. It may have to be routed to a computer forwarding site for a new address label.

What about mail that doesn't go through an OCR? That's still subject to manual forwarding.
Click to expand...

Yeah, there will be a need for the "old" address information and barcode to be obscured and replaced with new so the piece doesn't tend to loop back to the old address.

There will always be some mail that makes it all the way to the carrier at the original address, and that will have to be forwarded the way it is done today, but I think that amount will be greatly reduced, leading to a decrease in the allotted office time and increase in street time.
 
A lot of this is driven by improved technology. When I started, OCRs were a small part of the mix and the ZMT that I was trained on had just replaced the original letter sorting machines. The current OCR is a racehorse compared to the rhinocerus we had to work with.
 
Esav Benyamin said:
A lot of this is driven by improved technology. When I started, OCRs were a small part of the mix and the ZMT that I was trained on had just replaced the original letter sorting machines. The current OCR is a racehorse compared to the rhinocerus we had to work with.
Click to expand...

The technology is pretty incredible. A good sized facility may be running 20 OCRs or more plus a couple dozen of retrofitted AFCSs and BCSs, or DBCSs all lifting images of addresses and sending them to the CIOSS that reads them, compares the addresses against a database of around 150 million addresses and returns a decision, including ZIP code and barcode - all that a couple of hundred times a second. It is by far the best optical character reading capability in the world. Pretty cool. If I were a clerk I would be looking for a job in maintenance.
 
mycroftt said:
If I were a clerk I would be looking for a job in maintenance.
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The smart ones did. When I made supervisor, a friend of mine went for electronic tech. Our mailhandler went for supervisor and got assigned to the new OCRs. The clerk jobs feeding these machines came in at a lower pay grade than the manual distributors they replaced. But then, the clerks union lost any influence it ever had years ago. One arbitrated contract after another went against them.
 
well, on tuesday afternoon at 2 pm, sawyers cutlery called and told me that the knife they shipped usps priority was being returned to sender. They found this out via the tracking number. The guy I talked to said they would send out the knife UPS that afternoon and just keep the knife that was returned. well, UPS ground from hingham MA to gloucester MA should have had the knife here yesterday if that was the case. If they shipped the knife wednesday, it should have been here today. it is 5:13 PM and still no UPS package. I emailed Sawyers for the tracking # for the ups package and haven't heard back from them. I've dealt with them in the past and they are FAST shipping things out. Problem is, i'm not going to be at this address after monday morning, and ups doesn't deliver saturday or sunday, leaving this evening and tomorrow (which i'm not going to be home) to get the knife. I'm beginning to get irate about this. USPS emailed me back today and said that they are going to try to rectify the change of address problem, which is all well and good, but there's a hundred dollar knife lost in transit it seems. I could have driven to hingham and picked the knife up at this rate. :grumpy:
 
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