I filled out a form to get my mail delivery stopped and the mail held at the post office before my week in San Diego. Yesterday, after buying a bunch of half price calendars at Borders and wrapping them up to send to people I'd just seen over Xmas, and failed to gift with anything more than cards since I'm a poor past/future college student, I headed to the post office to mail them off and pick up my accumulated mail. The lines were long, as always pre-post Xmas, and there weren't even any nubile young females to while away the time, eyeballing. This is true of most places/times in life, I've found. Unless you're wise enough to have brought along your own nubile young female, which I've been lucky enough to do quite often over the past few years.
I was not so blessed on yesterday's visit to the post office though, and thus I waited alone, until my turn came. I handed over the two packages I had to mail, and after paying what I thought was a fairly exorbitant sum to mail them off, I told the clerk that I'd been out of town for a week and needed to pick up my mail. She said okay, looked at the packages I was mailing, and said, "This is the address?"
I had affixed a return address sticker to the upper left corner of both parcels, with my name and address visible, as one does with packages sent forth into the toothy maw of the United States Postal Service. I replied in the affirmative, and that was all the proof she needed as she headed off into the bowels of the warehouse to retrieve my accumulated junk mail, bills, and pre-approved credit card offers. As she left, it occurred to me how woefully inadequate the mail security was. I'd turned in the "hold mail" card a week and a half previous without any form of ID, or even eye contact. I just wrote on the card and slipped it into a box set up for that purpose. Now that I had come to claim "my" mail, I had not been in any way challenged to prove it was in fact mine. I had a return address sticker, but that proved nothing; my stickers are simply computer printed labels on a page of stickers; plain 9 point black Verdana on a white sticker. Nothing preprinted or embossed or requiring more than a $.20 sticker page and a printer to create.
Now true, most mail in the US is delivered into wholly unsecured boxes that sit open at the street, inviting anyone who might wish to violate federal law by delving into them to do so freely. And the post office clerk might have been more suspicious if I looked shifty, or I lived in a poor area where people were routinely stealing Social Security checks from the mail. But still, it was hard not to get that feeling you do at some stores when you need merely swipe your credit card and sign absolutely any name in any handwriting, on an imprecise digital screen, to buy things. "Don't you want to like, check my ID? Or something?"
Spy and grifter movies never bother with mail-stealing scams since they're just too easy, I think. It's fun to watch criminals rip off a bank or rob a jewelry store or a casino. Real life crime, such as the basically effortless and risk-free pilfering of checks and cash from the mail, isn't depicted since it's not glamorous, and it's so easy any meth-head can, and does, do it to finance their particular chemical dependency. Cogitate on that next time you stick a bunch of checks into paper envelopes and put them in that box located at the end of your driveway; a box specifically situated to make opening and emptying it quickly, from a motor vehicle, nearly effortless...
Labels: criminals, xmas
