postal issues being addressed

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anyone else see this in the times?

Talk Therapy for Postal Rage


By JAKE MOONEY
Published: July 1, 2007

The low point in the relationship between United States Postal Service employees and customers in Brooklyn may well have come in late March, when someone videotaped a fellow customer’s five-minute, profanity-laced tirade against an employee at the borough’s Kensington post office and posted the clip on YouTube. More than a few commenters on the Web site said they lived in the area and knew how the ranter felt.
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Tom Bloom

Several weeks later, in response to other, unrelated complaints, the agency convened a new Customer Advisory Council, a panel of representatives from Brooklyn community boards, with the goal of improving service. The most recent of the group’s quarterly meetings, closed to reporters, was on June 21, and the next is tentatively scheduled for Sept. 20.

Alan Dubrow, the chairman of Brooklyn’s Community Board 12 and a member of the advisory panel, said the group has its work cut out for it.

“There have been times when I have been on line and there were no clerks behind the window,” said Mr. Dubrow, citing his experience as the holder of a post office box at the Kensington station. “If it’s quiet or something, all of a sudden they’ll go take a walk.”

The other panel members’ complaints, Mr. Dubrow said, mirror those of customers across the borough, from Williamsburg to Ocean Hill: brusque service, long lines for basic tasks like buying stamps, and a shortage of windows for picking up packages.

Just recently, Mr. Dubrow said, he waited a half-hour to deal with a matter regarding his post office box, only to be told he was in the wrong line. His e-mail complaint to post office management has gone unanswered for two weeks, he said Friday.

Even so, Bob Trombley, a Postal Service spokesman, said the response to the Customer Advisory Council was positive.

A similar advisory council, initiated in Jamaica, Queens, in the 1980s, is still in place and has been a success, Mr. Trombley said. As a result of the Brooklyn panel, he added, several post offices will soon have windows just for the elderly.

At the Kensington branch on a sweltering afternoon last week, meanwhile, there was even a sign that tensions might be easing. One customer, Nancy Halfon, a Kensington resident who arrived on her bike and spent 10 minutes mailing a package, emerged from the post office to report, happily, that an employee had gotten her a paper towel to wipe her sweaty brow.

“Clerk No. 4, Kensington Station, went above and beyond the call of duty,” Ms. Halfon said, brandishing a piece of paper with the woman’s name. She planned to report the woman to her supervisors for commendation.