An open letter to the Postmaster General

Dear Sir:

In contrast to Mayor Paz Radaza's commendable cleanup of Lapu-Lapu City, the Lapu-Lapu City Post Office, a GOCC I am informed, teeters in mismanagement and disservice.

I would like to bring to your attention some gross dereliction of duties and blatant disregard of existing policies regarding the handling of mail by certain personnel of the Lapu-Lapu City Post Office.  Their sheer neglect of duties in delivering the mail promptly and their failure to keep track of incoming mail, most especially those coming from abroad, have remained unchecked and unabated through the years, despite the hiring of new people early this year, due to the retirement of previous personnel. 

The new intakes conveniently blame their predecessors when confronted with issues on lost mail.  They are utterly non-cognizant of the fact that when they joined the postal service and were compensated by money coming from taxes paid by people they are tasked to serve, their duties and responsibilities include the cleaning up of the mess created by the people who went before them. They never give notices about registered mail to the addressees.  Never!  Their only saving grace is, they go out of their usual indolent way to deliver SSS checks to people concerned promptly. The reason they do this is dubious no less, I would presume.

If you visit the Lapu-Lapu Post Office you will see an even larger pile of undelivered mail there, courtesy of these new derelict personnel.  This situation has rendered the location of mail an impossibility. When the rightful recipients, who are subsequently informed by the senders that certain letters have been mailed to them whether locally or from abroad, inquire about them, the answers they can expect from these dysfunctional personnel are: "We can't find it!" or "It never reached us!"

Take this one from my own actual experience:  An invitation for the family to attend the vigil Mass (Christmas Eve) at the Sugbu Study Center was mailed at the Cebu City Post Office on December 7, 2012. It reached Lapu-Lapu City on December 8, 2012. We received the invitation on January 22, 2013.

Letters from abroad suffer an even worse fate:  A Christmas card from Cheltenham, England, was mailed on the first week of December, 2012. It reached us mid-February 2013.  A letter from our son containing pictures was mailed from Pamplona, Spain, sometime in March, 2013. We never received it.  A package containing business cards bearing my name was mailed from San Francisco, California, USA on July 30, 2013.  We haven't received it either, until now.

We inquired about them and gave the postman assigned to our barangay a week to look for them.  He came back after two weeks, we were informed that they could not find my son's letter, and the business cards from San Francisco never reached Lapu-Lapu City.

These people never give a damn that letters are sent through the postal service because the senders cannot afford to send them through couriers; that people pay good money for expensive stamps for these letters for extreme reasons, like asking forgiveness from a relative who is about to die, or an urgent need to inform certain individuals about a major event forthcoming, or to inform somebody about the death of a beloved aunt. The reasons are many. But these heartless personnel never care! I think all they care about is for the mail to be declared "unclaimed" after a certain period so they can scavenge their contents for things of value before the letters are ultimately burned. I have a stinking suspicion that they don't even wait that long to open letters that look very promising.

Their supervisors, for allowing them to sit on their jobs and receive salaries for duties and responsibilities they don't even care to do, are equally guilty for allowing this problem to exist and grow through the years.

By virtue of your position as Postmaster General, we certainly hope that you can do something to rectify this sorry situation. It is definitely giving the Philippine Postal Service a bad name. Are the days of dedicated postmasters totally gone?  Or is this inherent only at the Lapu-Lapu City Post Office?  Heaven help us!

--From an exasperated Lapu-Lapu City resident