Local postal delivery anything but ZippyLocal postal delivery anything but ZippyJanuary 17, 2003
There is a reason why Internet gurus refer to the U.S. Postal Service as "snail mail," but there are people here in Oakley who are starting to wonder if the Oakley Post Office is taking the name a little too much to heart.
After receiving numerous complaints about the length of time it takes for a letter to get from 94561 to 94561 I decided to run a test and mailed a letter to myself from the mailbox at the Raley's Shopping Center to my Oakley post office box. Round trip time: five days.
That is why I have decided to end my continuing series of the ABCs of Oakley with Z for Zip Code.
On Jan. 6, the U.S. Postal Service sent an e-mail press release stating that an IBM study showed that for the most part the postal service is running on track with their two- to three-day service. Their Oakland facility, which is the main office for our postal region, received a 94 percent rating in the survey, which they considered good, and perhaps it is. Regular first class mail is not guaranteed for overnight service. Although people might assume that is shouldn't take close to a week for mail to get from one side of town to the other.
In defense of the postal service, last Monday I sent a five-by-seven inch postcard from the mailbox in front of Raley's to my post office box and that letter did arrive in two days. The postmark showed it was sent to Oakland first and then, I am guessing, back to Oakley, although attempts to have that verified were unsuccessful.
Today we live in a world of instant gratification and since the inventions of e-mail and fax machines, people who work with computers tend to be a little disappointed in a service that takes even a extra day or two rather than an instant response. Of course there is always Next Day Air service.
Aside from the issue of delivery time there is also the fear of mail theft. This is something that I would have never thought of here in Oakley, except that a few weeks ago my son diligently collected the mail after school and came in with a handful of opened letters. At first I thought our mail had been damaged through the delivery somehow, but then I realized upon closer view that it was not my mail at all. In fact, it was from addresses located in three other neighborhoods around town. Each piece had been rifled in a way to suggest that someone had been searching for money. Papers were spilling out of the envelopes. Some were just junk mail, but one was an important loan document and another a property tax bill from the county.
Worried for those that were expecting their mail, I immediately brought the opened letters to the post office, where the clerk behind the counter didn't seem the least bit concerned or upset about the tampered letters I had brought him. He explained that someone must have stolen the mail from boxes in those other neighborhoods and then decided after looking through them to stash them in my box. For what? So that they could clear their conscience and make sure the people got their mail? We'll never know, I guess.
Apparently this type of thing happens all the time, according to the man at the post office. Most of the time from what I have been told the mail is just dumped over a nearby fence to be disposed of. Now a computer-wise person might say that we should forget about using the post office and complete all of our transactions through the Internet or over the telephone, but are those services any safer? We live in some troubled times, even here in little old Oakley.
There really are no answers here. The best we can hope for is to send your complaints about slow or missing mail to the post office in Oakley and the main facility in Oakland, as one of Oakley's business owners did recently. Or if you have a letter that needs to get across town in a hurry, get in your car and hand-deliver it.
Well, that wraps up our ABCs of Oakley series. A reader suggested I start an encore to this series by doing Oakley by the numbers. I'll have to think about that one first.
Roni Gehlke's column on life in Oakley appears each week in the Brentwood News.
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