LETTER: Mail backlog delivery represents extraordinary concern

As a retired U.S. Postal Service employee, I feel compelled to address the poorly written, vague article (Peninsula Daily News, May 15 “Three-year Mail backlog arrives at business center”).

The alarming caption with the photo “ ‘Snail mail’ mishap” certainly caught my attention.

My calculation, based on an average household like mine, would amount to a mind-boggling 4,500 pieces of delayed mail (five pieces of mail a day, approximately 300 regular delivery days a year, times three years).

A business center would receive a substantially higher volume.

Showing business adviser Kevin Hoult seated at a table rifling through a mere 20 pieces of mail was ridiculous.

It’s easier to make the Postal Service the butt of yet another joke than to recognize the extraordinary concern of some conscientious postal employee.

Maybe that was the intent of the article and explains it’s front page placement.

When an individual, family, or business moves, it’s important that an Official Forwarding Change of Address (PS Form 3575) be filled out.

Mail will be forwarded for 12 months.

For a business, if only an individual employee’s name appears, the mail piece becomes undeliverable-as-addressed.

Dead letters, undeliverable pieces, items that have fallen out of packages, all go to the Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta, Ga.

Oh, and Mother’s Day cards only addressed to “Mom.”

The MRC’s job is to, well, find “Mom.”

And about that derogatory term “snail mail.”

Just to see the joy in someone’s face after receiving a precious, old-fashioned handwritten letter, is delightful and so human.

Diane Jerich-Domin,

Port Ludlow