Today when I got home from work and got the mail, I found the envelope pictured to the right -- a birthday card from my office. It had already been opened and then scotch-taped back together.I called my office manager to see if she had sent the envelope in this condition. (Just in case of the slim possibility that she had run out of envelopes and sent me a previously used one, or maybe she sealed the envelope without inserting the card.)
Nope. She confirmed my suspicion that the envelope was sealed properly when it left our office. It appears that someone in the postal service thought I might be getting some birthday cash.
As it turns out, there was not supposed to be any cash in the envelope, but it serves as a good reminder that we should never put cash in an envelope and send it in the mail. (Either send a check or hand-deliver the card.)
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Yesterday I wrote that when I got the mail, my birthday card had already been opened and taped shut. Since it had been mailed from my office to my home, I mentioned it to Earl in the mail center at work. He, in turn, reported it to the post office.
We expected that they would say that it had gotten caught in a machine. As you can see from the picture in yesterday's post, however, it clearly wasn't mangled the way an envelope caught in a mail-sorting machine would be. It looked like someone opened it with their index finger.
When Earl delivered the afternoon mail, he told me the post office had received other complaints about mail being opened. In fact, they already suspected a certain employee has been opening thick card envelopes which may have cash in them. Today they set him up and caught him in the act! He's now in police custody facing federal charges!
Think about this. A federal employee who takes the time to not simply open envelopes and steal the cash, but to open them, look for money, then put the card back in the envelope and tape it shut. If he obviously went to such great efforts, why didn't he use a letter opener? If I had received my envelope and it had been opened along the top, I probably wouldn't have even noticed...or if I had, it wouldn't have been so blatantly obvious. But I knew that a business office would not send torn open envelopes in the mail.
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