Rene Brown has picked up her mail in the same community box for 18 years. When the base rotted and it fell over, she went to her local post office in New Port Richey.
“They kind of laughed,” Brown said. “It was kind of like this big joke. They looked at the person next to them and they go, ‘Yeah, it’s going to be forever. Our maintenance guy is out and it may be forever.'”
For six weeks, Bown and her seven neighbors had to pick up their own mail with no new mail box in sight.
“I do have a job,” Brown said. “Sometimes I have to leave work at lunch hour to go there to pick up the mail.”
She figured it would be a couple of weeks to get a new community box, not six. Brown said even offered to buy her own mailbox but that is not allowed in the Mill Pond neighborhood.
It’s a community box, owned and maintained by the United States Postal Service. That means Brown could not do anything to help herself, except complain.
She asked for a supervisor.
The driving back and forth to the post office is getting old and the lack of answers is even more frustrating.
“They tell me something different every time I go in,” Brown said. “I started to wonder, ‘Well, how long is forever?’ And that’s why I decided to call you.”
So she turned to Better Call Behnken and within hours, we had a promise to make things right.
A spokeswoman for the United States Postal Service sent this statement:
“The Postal Service strives to provide the best possible service to our valued customers. We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been experienced, due to the damaged Cluster Box Unit (CBU) in this New Port Richey neighborhood. Local postal officials have taken steps to address the situation. We anticipate the mailboxes will be repaired, and mail delivery will resume, by the end of this week. We appreciate our customers’ patience during this time.”
