February 2016 by Lydia Gastrell
This used to be a great little post office. The town of Nobleton doesn't have home delivery; everyone gets their mail from assigned PO boxes at the office. For years this worked just fine because the previous clerk would place mail in our boxes even when the address was our physical home address and not the PO Box. The new clerks in the last 6 months or so hate doing this and are constantly writing little notes on our letters and packages like "MUST HAVE PO BOX NUMBER OR WILL BE RETURNED TO SENDER." Now, there are many businesses and government agencies who absolutely refuse to send things to a PO Box. Even when we call and confirm our identities and such they tell us that, by law, they cannot send prescriptions to a PO Box. We have told this to the clerks, who tell us the same thing every time, "Just get the PO box somewhere in the address, like as an apartment number, or just do the last four of the zip code." We do that and yet they still write the nasty little notes on our mail and send things back, so that advice is garbage. The new clerks are simply too lazy to look up the street addresses in their book and see which box they correspond to. Or they could memorize them. For crying out loud, Nobleton doesn't even have 200 residents. When I worked as a cashier, I had the codes memorized for 100 different types of produce in like two months. They simply don't want to do it. OR they are being told to do these things by some new supervisor, in which case I apologize to the clerks, and your supervisor sucks. This isn't just frustrating, it is dangerous and it is costing the residents of Nobleton money. I had to pay shipping twice on something I bought because one of the clerks returned it to sender. He did this knowing full well who I am and which box is mine. He did it because of "the rules", not because he was unable to give me my damn package. There are people here who get their medicines in the mail and can't get the senders to use a PO box. MEDICINES! People's bills are arriving late or not at all because they are being returned, and people are getting charged late fees and getting calls about late payments. Either give us home delivery service or accept that the post office at Nobleton has to make allowances for the PO Box thing. It's one or the other because we CAN'T force government agencies or businesses to use PO box numbers when they refuse to. Those are the facts. PS: We also used to leave used books on the windowsill inside the office and residents would share them, but the new clerks decided that wasn't allowed either and taped mean "DON'T PLACE ANYTHING HERE!" signs on the countertops and sills.
