Customer Mad as Hell, Ready to Go Postal

We’ve all read the stories of what are euphemistically called disgruntled postal workers, those murderous souls who’ve unfairly turned this vital civil service occupation into the butt of so many jokes.

San Fernando Valley postal workers should actually be feeling pretty gruntled these days. As my colleague Julie Tamaki reported Wednesday, a survey conducted by Price Waterhouse, the same firm entrusted with the sacred duty of collecting and counting Academy Awards ballots, recently found our local mailmen and mailwomen to be California’s most punctual, and second nationally to their colleagues in Wichita, Kan.

All of this may come as a surprise to the public. We tend to take mail service for granted until there’s a screw-up. And then there are those who insist that good service is the exception, not the rule. This is the story of one such disgruntled postal customer.

His name is Sam Frank. He’s an entertainment writer who lives in North Hollywood, a freelancer who relies heavily on the U.S. Postal Service.

“Let’s get into some heavy emotions here. I’m furious. I’m not just disgruntled. . . . I’m sick and disgusted and appalled and shocked at how incredibly incompetent our system is.”

He’s not the kind of guy who has trouble expressing his emotions.

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Sam Frank has his story and postal officials have theirs. As for the story you are now reading, I sincerely wish it concerned another topic. There may be no getting to the bottom of this mess.

Frank first called me several weeks back with his horror story. Over the last 10 years, he figures he’s had more than 100 pieces of mail, from letters to entire book manuscripts, lost or stolen or woefully delayed within the postal system.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Frank says that, in the past year, he filled out about 20 “lost mail and rifling reports,” known to postal workers as form 1510. Not once, Frank says, have postal workers succeeded in locating his missing mail.

Frank became exasperated while trying to sell a partial manuscript for a guide called “TV Shows on Home Video” to two New York publishers and was frustrated that, although he mailed copies on the same day, they arrived at their destinations a week apart, complicating negotiations. (As it was, he ended up signing a contract with a third publisher.)

Frank says that on Feb. 16 he called postal inspectors in Pasadena to complain. Told that he needed to fill out more form 1510s, he became angry and gave them the information over the phone.

Luz James, a supervisor in the Pasadena office, says her records show that Frank became irate and “threatened to contact the media.” (The only fact I can vouch for is that he indeed followed up on that threat.)

James referred me to postal service spokeswoman Terri Bouffiou , who later referred me to Stacia Crane, consumer affairs manager for postal services in the San Fernando Valley area. Crane works at the Santa Clarita Processing and Distribution Center, which handles 5 million pieces of mail each night.

Both Bouffiou and Crane expressed puzzlement over Frank’s problems. Human or mechanical errors occasionally result in mail’s being misdirected and lost. Theft also occurs, they said, but infrequently.

Odder still, Crane says, was the fact that, apart from Luz James’ record of Frank’s phone call, she could find no copies of the form 1510s. “I have active customer records going back a couple of years and they’re not in here. He’s not here. . . . We’d like to help him, but there’s no history here.”

Crane said she was surprised that she, as the local trouble-shooter, had never spoken to Sam Frank.

It was then that I asked myself, “What would Jimmy Carter do?”

I gave Sam Frank’s phone number to Stacia Crane.

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Perhaps 10 minutes later, Stacia Crane called me back. She seemed even more puzzled than before.

Later I called Sam Frank. He seemed a little less agitated, though still far from gruntled. (If nothing else, at least they now know each other.)

Stacia Crane, Frank said, had assured her the postal service would do a better job for him.

Frank told her that assurances are meaningless. Maybe the lost mail of other customers had been found, he told the trouble-shooter, but his never had.

It all just seemed to disappear, like his missing mail reports. Curiouser and curiouser.

We’ve all heard stories of mail turning up decades after it was posted. It made Frank, a film and TV historian, think of something that happened a couple of years back.

A reel of the film “On the Waterfront,” posted by registered mail 28 years earlier, had finally been delivered.

It wound up, Frank said, at the wrong address.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311. Please include a phone number.