Bonus Blog: Informed Delivery

The US Postal Service is a national institution, of which many Americans seem incredibly proud. But I have to say, for my money it's making the venerable Royal Mail look tremendous.

USPS is certainly ubiquitous. Over here, you see its funny little vans everywhere. What's more, mail redirection is a free service, which we've taken advantage of since moving from Sunnyvale. In signing up for that, USPS also suggested I use their Informed Delivery service, allowing you to receive scans of your post via email before it is delivered. Sounds great, doesn't it?

I have to admit, I had my suspicions about this. Why exactly was it quite so easy for USPS to email me scans of my mail? Are they just scanning it all anyway, and was I OK with that? I suspect they probably are...

But never fear, because once you've signed up, you get to see just how badly this scanning works. The first thing you notice is that they quite often tell you about pieces of mail that they couldn't scan. After this happened a few times, I noticed that this seems to be size-based - anything bigger than a fairly small envelope, they don't seem to be able to scan. In particular, anything which is, say, A4 size just isn't going to get scanned. If you want to surprise us, you know what to do.

Secondly, the stuff that is scanned bears only a passing resemblance to the things which get delivered on any given day. It's not that the pictures are bad or wrong, it's that the timescale on which items are delivered varies so much, that they might as well not tell you when things are supposed to arrive. Given that part of the reason for the service to exist is ostensibly for you to tell them when mail hasn't been delivered, this makes it all somewhat pointless.

And then we get to packages. I've previously mentioned the 50/50 hit rate we have with Amazon deliveries, and how I've now ceased trading with Amazon as a result. Informed Delivery also tells you all kinds of interesting things about your packages (apparently Bank of the West ship cheque books nationwide from Raleigh, North Carolina), but the one critical thing - when will it arrive, and has it actually been delivered somewhere - well, I'm afraid that's too much to ask. What you really want is photographic evidence that your parcel has actually been delivered - a picture of where the postie left it would be just great. But instead, all you get is a rough indication of where it was left, and a very rough indication of when it was left there.

A couple of examples: last week, that cheque book was apparently delivered to the "front door/porch" at 19:31 on Monday. We searched and searched, found it wasn't there, and started thinking about complaining to USPS again. In fact, it was delivered some time on Tuesday. And of course, before this our vacuum cleaner was delivered "to our mailbox". Given that the house doesn't have one, that could be tricky; to be honest, I'm not sure I've seen many houses with a mailbox big enough to hold a vacuum cleaner, but there we are.

The days when we'd be told a parcel had been left "behind the sheep" and that was useful to us seem to be over. Joni was right; you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone...

Anywhere behind the sheep is fine.