Service of Unsung Heroes: Mailmen
Thursday, November 2nd, 2023
The post office doesn’t always get top grades but some of the mailmen should. Talk about unsung heroes.
A friend was lugging a package to the post office the other day when her mailman saw her on the street and asked if he could take it for her. Made her day.
We recently had a change of mailman which made me sad because the original one was a living computer. When I’d been here less than a month he knew to direct mail to me even if it had the wrong apartment number or no apartment number–a requirement in NYC. As I’ve mentioned on this blog, there are 510 mailboxes.
He was replaced by Kirk, with the same kind of memory. I entered the mail room one day while he was finishing up and he asked if he could get my mail for me and went to the correct box. I was amazed.
NYC has a mail theft crisis. We’ve read about it in the news. The letters I put in the box in our building always arrive.
A major financial institution sent me the following in a letter in September urging its clients to opt for direct deposit rather than traditional checks. “On February 27, 2023, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network published an alert highlighting the nationwide surge in mail theft-related check fraud. From March 2020 through February 2021 the United States postal inspection service received 299,020 mail theft complaints an increase of 161% compared with the same period an earlier year.
“Check fraud occurs when there is an interception and manipulation of a hard copy check that is meant to defraud the account owner.”
Why did I post the dates? It took the firm I work with seven months–from February to September–to get out this missive. It took the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network a year to alert financial institutions with the alarming statistics reported for March 2020-February 2021.
But I digress.
Years ago I was crossing Lexington Avenue near an office building I’d not worked in for 10 years. The mailman said hello and greeted me by name, and I was one of many employees on just one floor.
Is your mailman or woman terrific? Are there other unsung heroes who make our lives easier who are often overlooked? Do you wonder about how some organizations and institutions interpret the word “alert” as “when we get around to it,” and how they determine the priority of urgency of some information?
