I’m not sure exactly what’s happening, but my resident United States Postal Service worker is starting to slip. In just the last year alone, his performance has become irregular, sloppy, and downright unreliable at times. For a while, I truly thought that I had the best USPS guy in the greater Orlando area serving my apartment complex. He was always upbeat, friendly, and the mail arrived promptly at three o’clock every business day.

Beyond his regular quality service, he also proved that he was willing to go above and beyond the call of duty. I once had a very important package overnighted to me and it was vital that I be present at my apartment the following day in order to receive it. I took the day off of work so that I would be available to sign the confirmation when it was delivered, but in a quick change of circumstances, I ended up having to go into the office and was pulled away from my post. I spent the entire day worrying that if I wasn’t home when the postal worker came by, then the delivery of the package might be delayed by a few days. Rushing home on my lunch break just after three o’clock, my concerns were realized as the package was nowhere in sight. At the time, I was living on a second floor apartment, and because there wasn’t a box sitting snugly against my door frame and a visit to the leasing office proved fruitless, I became frustrated that I had missed the delivery. I went back to work in a foul mood, passive-aggressively torturing my co-workers for the inconvenience that they had caused me.

Returning home that night, I stepped out on my balcony and was met with quite a surprise. Behind a chair, I found a plain brown box haphazardly placed in the corner, emblazoned with a large orange sticker that read “Red Hot Delivery!” I took a moment to ponder how the package had appeared there. The apartment stairs did not lead directly up onto the balcony so the only option was that my faithful USPS worker, determined to overcome any obstacle, be it rain, sleet, snow, or a second floor apartment in order to deliver the mail had likely tossed the box up onto the balcony from the ground floor. The glass vase that had been pulverized by the box during its flight trajectory and now laid in pieces across the balcony floor backed this theory. While I admired the tenacity of the mailman, I’m glad he didn’t overshoot and send the box sailing through the window. Later on, looking up from the ground floor I noticed that there hadn’t even been a straight shot up onto my balcony, so I assumed that in his free time, the mailman had also been practicing his hook shot.

Ever since that fateful day, his service has started slipping. I don’t know if he is feeling the pressures of an email-heavy society or if he’s just burnt out on his job, but the mail has been arriving late, letters either arrive weeks after they should have or are returned to the sender, and his package deliveries are leaving more and more to be desired.

Figure A - Actual Photo.

About six months after the Red Hot delivery, I was anticipating another important delivery en route to my doorstep. I wasn’t exactly sure when it would be arriving, but I figured he would leave the delivery with the apartment leasing office in the event that I wasn’t home. The day that the package came, I arrived at my apartment faced with an interesting sight: the box had indeed been delivered in my absence, but not left safely in the care of the leasing office as I had hoped. Instead, the box sat directly in front of my door, out in the open and available for anyone who happened to walk by to scoop up and make off with. Now in his defense, he had attempted to hide the box by covering it up with my doormat. Under different circumstances this may have been effective, however, the box delivered was twice the size of the doormat itself (Figure A). This isn’t the work of a hard working postal employee, but rather a man who has just stopped trying.

I’m not sure what was said to the mailman, or if he’s just going through a rough time in his life, but I hope that he pulls it together in order to provide the high quality of mail delivery that I had come to expect from him. In the meantime, I’ll be asking friends and family to pause on sending me any physical mail, and I’ll stop ordering anything via USPS that I might value since I now know that once it arrives it will be open game to all of the apartment residents. If that doesn’t work then I’ll just have to look into buying a really big doormat.

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