From telecom@delta.eecs.nwu.edu Mon Aug 16 11:57:11 1993 Received: from delta.eecs.nwu.edu by grissom.larc.nasa.gov (4.1/server2.4) id AA29381; Mon, 16 Aug 93 11:57:08 EDT Received: by delta.eecs.nwu.edu id AA21149 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for kludge@grissom.larc.nasa.gov); Mon, 16 Aug 1993 10:57:02 -0500 Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1993 10:57:02 -0500 From: TELECOM Moderator Message-Id: <199308161557.AA21149@delta.eecs.nwu.edu> To: kludge@grissom.larc.nasa.gov Subject: Re: FNB, The Post Office and Me Status: R Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1993 20:10:22 -0500 From: TELECOM Moderator Subject: FNB, the Post Office and Me Since several people have asked for 'the rest of the story', here is what happened to me. The year was 1974. As stated, I've had a post office box at Chicago 60690 for about 25 years. At the time in question, I had the box for seven or eight years. There are good and bad things about having a box in a large downtown post office like 60690. One good reason is the hours of operation: 24 hours per day, seven days per week. Go get your mail when you please. Another good reason is the additional degree of privacy such a post office affords. In smaller post offices with only one or two clerks and limited hours of operation, the clerks know everyone there. Postal patrons can have no secrets or mail arriving that the clerks don't know about. In all large post offices like 60680 or 60690, mail is sorted *only* by box number. Any name at all can be on the envelope; as long as your box number appears there, you get the mail. Thus, you can share a box with a friend, get mail only to the box number if for some reason you don't want to give your name out, etc. And, there is so much mail and so many people working there, you can remain relatively private and anonymous if you like. The bad reasons are mostly technical in nature but pose nuisances and annoyances from time to time. 60690 is heavily biased toward business customers, and *large* business customers at that. About 95 percent of the boxes are occupied by several large mailers and mail receivers. All the downtown banks and large corporations are there as is the telephone company. Telco has a 'phantom zip code' which exists only to sort their mail. All the banks and many other large corpora- tions have 'phantom box numbers' which are used for mail. That is, their mail is not put in a box with a number on it, but is kept in large bins and bags on the loading docks, etc. If someone is writing to a bank, let's say with their monthly mortgage payment but they put *your* box number on the envelope, *you* will get the letter even if it does say First National on the envelope. Another problem is the sorting in general. Supposedly, in theory, mail for the banks comes from the Main Post Office in trays already 'verified', meaning the entire contents of a bag or large bin of mail is for the bank. The clerks at 60690 need merely to riffle the mail, that is, thumb rapidly through the trays to insure that all the envelopes therein do say at one of many various phantom box numbers may have for sorting purposes between credit card payments, mortgages, customer deposits, etc. What was going wrong back at the time of my experience was the 'big house' (an internal name at the post office for the Main Post Office workrooms) was not correctly verifying bank mail, but dumping anything and everything to the bank regardless of who it actually belonged to. This went on for months without any effort to correct the problem. On a typical day I would receive my mail and at least one or two pieces would have been opened, stapled back shut and have a rubber stamp endorsement on the front saying 'opened in error by First National Bank of Chicago'. *No amount of hell raising with the bank or 60690 did any good whatsoever. The post office did as they pleased and First National Bank did as it pleased.* Nor was it just First National. I got letters endorsed opened in error by Continental Bank, LaSalle National, etc. In the bank's defense, they said that there was no way they could possibly review the name and address on an envelope prior to opening it. They open hundreds of letters hourly in an automatic machine. The mail room supervisor at the bank told me once, "I have a large number one bag from the post office here full of mail sorted out to us in error to be returned *when I get around to it* ..." At the time, I was doing some promotional work with telephone lines attached to recording devices which played community announcements of interest along with short news items. That's another story in itself but what I had was a dozen phone lines in rotary hunt hooked up to big mammouth recording machines the phone company supplied me with large round drums inside with magnetic tape on them. These drums would spin around as a metal finger rubbed against them. All the lines were in rotary hunt on the number HArrison-7-1234. I think I got usually 2000-3000 calls per 24 hour period to listen to the three minute messages. According to Illinois Bell, I was the first customer they had doing telephone recorded messages other than religious applications, weather forecasts, etc and never before anyone doing it in the quantity I was over several lines in hunt, etc. The recorded messages among other things offered for sale maps and tourist guidebooks for Chicago. I had transit maps, discount hotel and restaurant coupons, etc. The Chicago Visitors and Tourists Bureau sponsored this part. I filled the orders from my post office box. Since the package of coupons, maps, etc cost five dollars, many people -- maybe most -- sent cash in the mail. They also got a copy of the current issue of {Chicago Magazine}. I began getting people complaining their package had never arrived, and when checking my records, I had no record of their order in the first place. Generally I just went ahead and filled those orders since the Vistors and Tourists Bureau would cover it for me. Finally one day in the mail came an envelope 'opened in error by First National Bank of Chicago' ... and a letter from someone asking for their package of coupons and maps, etc. The front of the envelope had correction fluid white out on it, and holding it up to a light I could read the notation, "$5 cash" which had been whited-out. There was no five dollars in the envelope needless to say. After a month or two of similar cases, finally my break came when a customer wrote to say I had cashed his check but never sent the materials. I asked him for a copy of his check and he sent it to me. Sure enough ... pay to the order of Patrick Townson, and the back side of the check, where the endorsement would go had a rubber stamp message, 'pay to the order of the payee named within'. I had no account at First National in those days! (I do now and have had for several years.) Cancelled check in hand, I went to First National to see a customer service representative. All I wanted was my money. All I got was a stall and a run-around. The records are in the warehouse, I have to order the microfilm, it might be a month, we will get back to you. A supervisor was quite arrogant about it, particularly when I told her the bank had committed forgery. I was told in no uncertain terms that the people at the bank were far too busy to actually read what they signed or endorsed; too busy to respect the privacy of people whose mail they opened, etc. I told her that did not wash. As a matter of fact at the same period of time I was getting once a week without fail a check payable to First National Bank for several thousand dollars each time from a place called First Boston Mortgage Corp. I was getting it because the sender was using my box number instead of the bank's phantom box which had an extra zero in the box number. I told her I was sure that if I employed the same rationale, ie. I am too busy to pay attention to what I sign and had *cashed the check and put it in my account* that the bank would try to keep me in jail the rest of my life! So why was the bank different? Blame the post office she said ... they are the ones who give us your mail. I asked her if that would be satisfactory next Thursday when the weekly check from First Boston showed up in my box. She had no answer. Every time I got the check, I would go to the window and hand it in. A few times the post office turned around and put it back in my box a second time 'because it has your box number'. The only way I could get rid of those checks finally was by marking though the address and obliterating it completely except for the name "First National Bank" and making a notation on the envelope 'Not for box xxx at 60690'. *Then* I would not see the envelope again until the next week when another check showed up. Finally I started returning them with my own postage to First Boston in a separate envelope; after doing that a couple times the address got fixed in the computer at First Boston. Meanwhile, the bank's arrogance about this whole thing was absolutely astounding. In one day's mail, I got twenty pieces of mail, some of which had been mailed a month earlier, all marked 'opened in error by First National Bank'. Some had gone to the bank, been returned by the bank to the post office *and gone back to the bank a second time* before they eventually reached me. Two months went by, and FNB was no closer to giving me my five dollars than they were the day I first asked. I had no way of proving they took more; all I could do was use what evidence I had at that point which was the one cancelled check they had endorsed. I finally got totally sore about it and decided to force the issue in Small Claims Court. I decided to sue them for all such instances of 'I never got my package', which at that point was a couple dozen cases. I took all the complaint letters I had received, times five dollars each; copies of my advertising showing my box number which demonstrated that in fact money did come to my box on a regular basis and put together a package of the whole thing as the attachment to the Small Claims suit. In all, I asked for $200, which was the total of the complaints I had received from people, the five dollars I could prove with the cancelled check, the costs of making up the copies for my complaint and the costs of legal service and court. I filed it that day in the court house and made service myself on the First Chicago Corporation, owners of the First National Bank of Chicago. In my complaint I said that First Chicago Corporation instructed its employees in their duties, and that said employees opened mail not addressed to themselves or their employer and that said contents of mail were then scattered or lost in defendant's mail room. I asked the court to award me my losses as a result and to instruct the defendant in the proper procedures for handing mail not addressed to itself. At the same time I filed a complaint with the Postal Inspection Service asking the post office to close the boxes belonging to the bank and return its mail to the senders until such time as bank agreed to bring itself into compliance with federal law pertaining to the opening of first class mail not addressed to oneself or one's employer if one's duties involve opening mail. The bank had a real hissy fit over that postal complaint, believe me you. Of course the post office did not close their boxes -- although had the shoe been on the other foot and I were accused of fraud and illegal interception of mail they certainly would have closed my box -- and had no hesitation in doing so. The Postal Inspection Service wrote me to say it would take a court order to close the bank's boxes and they doubted such an action would be successful. None the less the bank wrote me a very nasty note about it. I heard nothing more from the bank until the afternoon before the case was up in Small Claims. Then, an attorney from the bank called me. Talk about more arrogance! Hello, Mr. Townson? This is X at First National. I am reading your complaint. What is all this about? (he was on a speaker phone in his office). ME: What does it say it is about? Well why didn't you have the bank investigate it and research it? ME: I did ask that. Read the file. Note the name of the supervisor who I spoke to, and the vice president in charge of customer service .... but before we go further, are you on a speaker phone in your office? Ummm, well yes I am ... ME: Good, then let's begin by you telling me the names and positions the other persons in the room with you. (he then, after I had to prompt him, gave me their names. With him was the mail room supervisor, the remittance department supervisor, and the Vice President - Operations). Atty again: Well, we are going to clear this up for you, I will get a voucher made up for the money you lost and have a check sent out to you right away. We want you to go to court tomorrow and drop this case and let the court know we have cleared it up internally. ME: Will your money reach me before I go to court tomorrow? Uh, no, I have to get this approved and get a check written up so it will be a week or two. ME: Then I go to court tomorrow and get my judgment. You can pay from the judgment. Well, if you are going to insist on going to court, we won't pay you at all. There is no reason to act like you are doing. ME: What's the matter with going downstairs right now with a voucher in your hand, go up to the teller line, get a two hundred dollar cashier's check and sending it to me? Well we don't do that. ME: In that case, you get sued. There is one way I will call off the case in court tomorrow. You go now and get my money and I will have someone pick it up later. The check will be endorsed and cashed at your teller line downstairs to make sure you don't stop payment on it after I get it and dismiss the case. I need to get a signed agreement that this is resolved in full and you have no further complaints against the bank. ME: And I need a signed statment that the bank agrees to obey federal laws at all times regarding first class mail handling and that the bank won't open what does not belong to it. I am not sure that is the law at all. ME: Oh? Well in that case then get sued and find out. Tell me this. If you get sued tomorrow and I prevail -- which you know perfectly well I will in Small Claims -- do you intend to pay the judgment against you at that point in time? We may or we may not. Usually we *do not pay judgments entered in Small Claims* it is against our policy. ME: Oh? Well thanks for letting me know. Then what I have to do I guess is get my judgment in hand, take it to Chancery Court (Chancery is a court for special remedies here) and ask Chancery to appoint a reciever for the bank for the purpose of paying judgments entered against the bank; mine and whatever other ones there may be outstanding. You wouldn't !!!! ME: Sure I would, and with the appointment of a reciever would come a press release to the {Wall Street Journal} and the {Chicago Tribune} announcing that First Chicago had been placed in limited receivership for the purpose of paying its debts ... =================== Well, the conversation went back and forth like this a couple more minutes and he said on the way to Small Claims in the morning I could come in and get my check. I went in the next morning, and they did not have it ready. I did talk to the attorney dude in person though, and he swore that he would have the check in a couple hours ... taking him at his word I went to Small Claims and stated to the court a resolution had been reached. After leaving I went back and got the check as promised. I stopped at the post office on the way home and saw the Station Manager for 60690 and gave her a copy of the filing for her own information. She told me they had 'heard all about it' from a supervisor at 'the big house' and that 'new procedures were in place' to 'verify the trays' for the bank as they arrived rather than just toss the whole load into the bank's bins without further sorting. A couple weeks later, the {Chicago Tribune} had a story on an inside page of the front section entitled "18 Employees of First National Bank Discharged for Theft". The story said that the day before, all 18 had been confronted after being spied on by supervisors, etc. who had 'salted the mail' with marked money and that dusting powder they put on it which shows up on your hands under ultra-violet light. The story went on to say that bank investigators had deliberatly tested each employee in remittances and mailroom, and that these emloyees -- half the department in each case! -- had been dipping into incoming mail and pocketing the cash. This was not only in the case of mail addressed to the bank, but whatever mail came through, due to missorted stuff by the postal clerks at 60690, etc. I felt really good reading that story. Although it said nothing about me, I think I was the reason the investigation was started. Maybe a month after that, the Postal Inspectors did a clean out of the workroom at 60690 and fired quite a few people working there for similar incidents. When the scandal with the Missionary Fathers came up about ten years ago, the post office started requiring everyone who works in the sorting area to wear special clothes ... virtually no clothes at all. The folks come to work in street clothes, but in the employee locker room they have to strip and put on baggy coveralls with no pockets in them. When they get off duty, they strip under the watchful eye of the inspectors to put on their street clothes and leave. Female workers in the sorting room have to be observed by a Matron in their locker room who watches them closely for the same reasons. Maybe Jack was right in his original article. Maybe there is less fraud and mismanagement in the private drops than in the postal service, although I doubt it. The United States Postal Service is a very troubled and sometimes violent place to work, ie. Enid, Oklahoma and Royal Oak, Michigan. If I had to say who had the worst hellholes for back room operations, it would be hard to choose between the post office, the big banks downtown or the credit card companies. They all are very depressing places to work especially in their back offices. Patrick Townson