This is an open letter to the downtown Truckee post office. You, as a post office, are the most dysfunctional, mindless, unaccommodating group of derelicts I have had the “pleasure” of dealing with in my entire life.

I do not understand how you can look at yourselves in good conscious. Do you ever see the multitudes of people leave the post office in bitter huffs and start to wonder if perhaps it is you, the postal employee, and not them.

Talking with people around town about the (dys)functionality of you is like talking about the plague; you want to do something about it, but there is no accountability on the postal end (at least none I have ever seen).

On to the problem-du-jour. Our lock broke on our box (your fault), an employee was nice enough to grab our mail. He said that we could grab our mail from either the front counter or knock on the side door until our lock was fixed. Nice offer.

My wife went to the post office and waited in line for 15 minutes to get our mail from the box. Then she was chastised for asking for our mail over the counter. Our box lock had been re-cored, but our old key wouldn't work. The clerk said there is a new lock, so there is nothing he can do, but we also could not obtain a new key?

I then went down after work (after postal hours) to try to get our mail. Nobody would respond to my pleas through the closed boxes, though I did see some faces look in my direction. I then went around the back to the loading dock where I was told that they could not get our mail for us, but that the problem would be resolved in the next few days.

Until then, what are we to do? In all seriousness, what?

Between a package being left and found on the loading dock over night, a priority package being sent in mid-November from the Bay Area, still having not arrived, and now this being the three most recent incidents, but only the tip of our postal iceberg, I am at the end of my rope.

Stupidity and idiocy run rampant in your yellow cinder-block dungeon. Postal customers are being held hostage by you. There is nowhere else for us to go that is not in some way or another affected by the downtown branch. This type of monopoly does not give you a right to treat your customers in the manner you do.

I now understand why Kramer on Seinfeld marched into his post office and shut down his delivery.

I hope this letter makes you think about how you conduct yourselves on a daily basis. People are, rightfully, not happy with you. And, for the unhappy people out there, I encourage you to keep filing your formal complaints. If you call 1-800-275-8777, you can do this. Maybe at some point something positive will come of this.

Lastly, as I understand it, Mary the interim Post Master, was brought in to solve the chronic problems that exist at the downtown branch. My question is this, Mary, what have you done, and what are you doing to resolve these issues? Thank you for reading.

<i>Chris “Howdy” Fowler is a Truckee resident.</i>