The Post Office is terrible

Allow me, friends, to vent.

The US Postal Service wants to ruin my life.

A little while ago, a month to be exact, my mailbox was broken into. This should strike you as odd because there's no reason anyone would ever want to break into my mailbox. I have nothing that is useful to anybody. This blog should be resounding proof of that. Well, my neighborhood has these mailboxes that are really everybody's mailboxes. It's a locker system. It stinks.

I know why that's there. It's Texas. It's hot. Going door to door will cause a person to sweat through their own personhood. It's being controlled by a Congress that is inept. Many of the problems that face USPS today are not of its own making. I understand.

I do not understand the USPS system to report a broken into mailbox. You call the postal inspector at 1-877-876-2455. You have to speak your answers into the phone. You don't hit a number like the good old days. You don't speak to a human like the gooder old days. You have to speak to a machine that is wet-brained. The machine understands 10% of the time. This happens.

But do you know what happens when the machine doesn't understand? It HANGS UP on you after saying, "I didn't understand your answer. Goodbye." It doesn't start from the very beginning. It doesn't keep trying in an endless loop. It doesn't give up and call a human. It just fucking hangs up.

I was so pissed after the fourth time this happened that I shoved my phone down my throat and tried to see if shitting it out would help me. A bowel obstruction and an anger management class later, I'm still drinking smoothies with no help to my lack-of-mail situation.

It's been a month and the mailbox still hasn't been fixed. I go once a week to pick up my mail at the post office. This would be great if the post office was a mile away. It's 20-30 minutes away in Austin traffic. Nobody knows when the mailboxes will be fixed. There's a spate of mailbox theft going around in Austin.

To make matters worse, my HOA is charging a late fee for a bill that was sent during this period. It is the only bill sent to me in my name but we're apparently a year behind. I figured out that they'd been sending bills to the old owner but a bureaucracy never admits fault and only doubles down.

The HOA is worse. The USPS has to exist. The HOA is there to take money and not protect your mailboxes.

What have I become?

UPDATE: