re: #102 steve_davis

Part of that’s because unlike lots of businesses, the mail is ABSOLUTELY sacrosanct. A postman I knew once told me that if a piece of mail dropped out of the sorting machine and wound up on the floor, there was a freaking procedure for how it got put back into the system, because of the level of paranoia concerning the mail getting to exactly whom it is supposed to get to. I could imagine that the folks on the other side of the wall are completely prohibited from simply grabbing a package and handing it over, even if the person has i.d. It’s probably a firing offense. And they may be afraid that getting into a discussion about it with a customer might lead to a CNN breaking news story with lots of dead postal employees involved.

Ignoring the customer would be far more likely to lead to someone on the verge of losing it opening fire than sympathetically explaining the situation would. And leaving aside that sort of concern (which is highly unlikely, truth to tell), ignoring someone who is asking for help in a case like that is bad customer service. It makes the organization look bad and encourages people to not do business with you.