Officious and irritating bureaucrats

[altivo]

Wednesday I put some printed documents into a padded envelope, addressed it to corelog (who lives in Canada), weighed it, looked up the correct postage, affixed the appropriate stamps, and put it in my mailbox. The letter carrier took it away.

Today it came back with a blank customs form taped to it and a snippy note telling me I must fill out a customs declaration. So I filled out the stupid declaration, marking it "No value, printed documents." But I thought to myself, "I shouldn't be doing this." So I went to the USPS web site and looked up the rule.

I'm right. First class mail or air mail, under 16 ounces, with no dutiable contents: NO FORM REQUIRED. Now I'm hopping mad. They delayed my outbound mail by four days for no good reason at all. If I haven't cooled off by tomorrow morning, I'm going to the post office to have a hissy fit. I have sent similar mail to Canada before, and never needed a declaration. It has always been delivered. A box or something over a pound, yes, I understand the requirement and I fill out the dumb form.

Comments

[kildoo-lonewolf.livejournal.com]

I can tell you my weekly nightmares about customs stupidities. I am buying a lot of things in USA and you should see all the problems I have with customs each time and I am not talking about when people forget things in our plane and that I have to ship these items all around the world.

How do you want me to know what kind of fabrics, where it was made and how much it is worth if the label is not on the **** T-shirt anymore. What is a big fuss about sending a very used T-shirt in USA, it won't kill anyone nor will it bring down the economy, especially when the owner is an american citizen.

But such is the complexity of free trade nowadays ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, and that's US customs inbound. I agree, they are twerps.

My problem though, is not with Canadian customs, who already let similar envelopes through recently. This is the local post office not knowing its own rules. The letter never got as far as customs.

You should label old t-shirts as "rags for paper making" or something like that. ;p

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

Seems like some soft spoken but vaugely threatening phone
calls are in order.

Thats bullshit man.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I can't threaten anything other than that I will take my mail to Harvard to send it rather than to Marengo. They don't care. And of course the snippy note was unsigned so there's no way of knowing who it was that was overstepping the rules. In general, our little post office does pretty well, but this was just plain stupid. With a holiday weekend now, this letter will take a whole extra week to reach its destination.

[animist.livejournal.com]

Good luck. If we don't see any more posts on LJ from you, I'll assume that you got the dreaded knock on the door. Then I will try writing you in Guantanamo. Wonder if I'll need a custom's declaration for that?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

If that happens, don't try writing to me. Take the whole story right to Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

[shadow-stallion.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* I feel your pain Tivo but in a different way. Our letter carrier is horrible, never know when he is going to turn up and we cannot seem to convince the Post Office to stop delivering mail for people that have not lived in this house for years. :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's familiar enough but it can be worse. When we lived in Chicago, not only did we continue to receive mail for people who had been dead for 20 years, but also mail addressed to other people as far away as five miles from us. The more I complained about that, the worse it got. We were sure that our own mail was being randomly dropped into boxes all over the north side too.

It was about that time when news stories started appearing about flagrant problems in the Chicago post office. Truckloads of mail that had been "stashed" rather than delivered. Sacks of mail dumped in the river or under tollway overpasses, or piled in alleys and set alight.

Terry Pratchett's book Going Postal has nothing on the Chicago post office, I'm afraid.

[shadow-stallion.livejournal.com]

That is just awful, I guess you did have it worse than we do. I have actually had some mail that was sent to me get sent back as undeliverable or no such address. o.O Personally I blame the explosion of development in our area. I think it may have overwhelmed our local postal service.

You boys stay safe this weekend, it is turning out to be an ugly weekend here. Malamute walking at 5:30AM is no fun at all when it is rainy and 32 degrees out. :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sounds like I should admonish you instead. The big storm appears to have passed south of us. Nothing here at the moment, though they still say we could get an inch of snow tonight and perhaps another tomorrow. That's peanuts. I don't like the temperature predictions for next week, though. Single digit daytimes. Brrr.

[(Anonymous)]

They'll have one of those disclaimers on their site "USPS tries to ensure information on this site is upto date but changes can be made without prior notice or some such nonsense"

Why do I have a feeling that I've had this discussion with someone before o.O
Well just don't make it personal with the person behind the counter, they suffer enough since any complaint with the system ends up heaped on them.

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

And the post office wonders why people don't want to use them anymore.

[deffox]

OK, next time I have papers to send I guess I'll use FedEx.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, the postal service is still OK. But obviously you can't trust them to know their own regulations, so to avoid delay you have to take things right to the post office and deal with them directly. I tried to save time by mailing direct from the house, and ended up losing a week between the moronic misinterpretation of the rules and the holiday weekend.

[corelog.livejournal.com]

How pestiferously annoying! :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's back in the mail now, but was undoubtedly delayed further by the silly holiday yesterday. You should have it in a week, I'm guessing.