Just One Complaint

Jill over at The Perlman Update has started doing the blog round up (BRU) again (yay!), and this week’s theme is five things you like and five things you dislike about post.

I did one of these a while back, so I am not going to do another. My feelings about Estonia have not changed, and I remain convinced that if you are unhappy in Estonia, it is because you WANT to be unhappy. For me, as I approach my one year anniversary here, I still completely get why people come here and want to stay. Or come back and retire. I love it here.

But there is one thing I do not love. It is post related but not post’s fault. Nor it is Estonia’s fault.

It is our mail service (or lack thereof). And it is the Post Office’s fault.

We started having issues with our mail back before Christmas. Presents that people ordered well in advance of the holiday were not arriving. That is largely due to the Department’s going to the DPO (Diplomatic Post Office) rather than the APO we had before. It was a cost saving measure, but it means that DPO mail is space available and gets last priority after APO mail is put on the planes. So at Christmas, when everyone using the APO mail is ordering gifts, chances are ours are going to get bumped.

So fine. This year I will order in October. Or better, I will buy them in the states when we are hopefully there on R&R.

Then in January, we had a new problem. One of the carriers the Post Office contracted with sent our mail to Moscow! Something like 15 bags of it. And it was never seen again. Mostly it was flat mail, not boxes, so if you had bills coming by snail mail (or, say, replacement credit cards…), they never arrived.

The post offices response was that we should be happy we get mail at all.

Um gee. Thanks for your service?

Now it has happened again. This time, some 24 bags were sent to Warsaw. I think we have gotten some of them back and are expecting the rest…eventually. And along the way, I have also gotten random late pieces missent to Amsterdam, Riga…

And today, I learned that the problem is not just in one direction.

I got a note from my dad saying he just received his Father’s Day card!

You know, that holiday in JUNE?

The card was postmarked June 6. Today is August 7.

It took less than that amount of time for my HHE to arrive, and it was on a SLOW BOAT!

And all of that could have been mitigated if someone had said, Oh my gosh, I am so sorry. We will do all we can to find your mail and make sure it doesn't happen again. But instead we hear that we should be happy we get mail at all…this is why people hate the Post Office.