• BJ LEWIS - Victoria Advocate
• Originally published May 20, 2008 at 9:07 a.m., updated May 20, 2008 at 9:07 a.m.

Sifting through the mail Friday afternoon, Betty Valchar thumbed through the typical delivery content: advertisements and notices about her mother’s medicare.

One piece stuck out, though. The envelope wasn’t bright and eye-catching or especially heavy, it was just in the wrong box, the wrong state even.

Valchar checked the address on the envelope and sure enough it was 139 Summer Lane, where she lives. Somehow she ended up with mail addressed to the Summer Lane in Bean Station, Tenn.

“How in the world did it get to my house with only 139 Summer Lane and not the correct zip code, not the right town?” Valchar asked.

Mail mixups have happened before, she said, but they were always among the nearby houses.

“We’ve got a new mail lady out here, but the letters get mixed up on the street and we exchange them and make it right,” she said. “But never like this.”

Valchar and her husband have lived at their Summer Lane address for 14 years now, and this is the first time mistaken mail has come from out of state.

“They keep going up on the stamps, but the service gets no better,” Valchar said.

She hopes mistakes won’t happen to stimulus checks people are waiting for.

“You don’t think there are crooks in this world who wouldn’t go and cash it? It’s scary just the thought of it.”

The U.S. Postal service processes over one million pieces of mail per day, said Jim Coultress, communications with the U.S. Postal Service. Out of that one million, 98 percent get sorted to the correct destination. The other percentage of mistaken mail can come from several possibilities, he said.

To see the reason for the Summer Lane mix up, Coultress said he would have to look at the envelope and the barcode markings on the front and back of envelopes for leads.

“Sometimes the envelope will tell us the complete story about what happened.”

Another reason for the mix up could have come from the machine used to read the envelope, the Optical Character Reader, Coultress said.

“The machines are so sophisticated nowadays we can even read some handwriting,” he said.

However, if for some reason, the print that was used was light or the envelope gets bent, mistakes can happen and a TN could look like a TX.

The handwriting on the envelope was hard to read, Valchar said. She could not tell the ‘Bean Station’ part of the address.

Depending on who printed the envelope, the wrong barcode may have been printed on the envelope.

“It could be our fault or it may not have been our fault,” Coultress said.

He would have to see the envelope to be certain.

“If this a one-time thing, chances are it won’t happen again,” he said.

Valchar planned to return the letter to the post office Monday afternoon.

Bj Lewis is a reporter for the Advocate. Contact him at 361-580-6535 or bjlewis@vicad.com.

• Print
• •
• Share
  • Share this item

    Send this to a friend

    Share on FaceBook

  • Grab the link

    Copy and paste the link:

  • Blog about it

    Blog about this page.

  • Close
• •
• 3 Comments
• •
• Favorite
• •
• Report error
  • Thank you for your submission.
    Error report or correction

    Contact name (optional) Contact phone/e-mail (optional)  

    
  • Close
• •