You don’t need your ultimate resting place to be a lifeless letter workplace, however sadly that’s the place 452 folks have discovered themselves, spending eternity as undeliverable mail with the U.S. Postal Service.
USPS Workplace of Inspector Common launched a Cremated Stays report this week detailing failures inside the publish workplace to ship these former people to their supposed ultimate locations. In keeping with Vice:
The USPS is the one authorized solution to ship cremated stays. At the least in principle, the USPS has strict procedures for dealing with such delicate and irreplaceable packages. Stays should be shipped through Precedence Mail Categorical and have an enormous orange sticker hooked up to the facet of the field (the sticker was teal). They’re additionally speculated to be dealt with otherwise than different Precedence Mail Categorical packages.
Nevertheless, the OIG report discovered some or all of those procedures will not be achieved between 28 and 50 p.c of the time, which might go a way in direction of explaining how 452 cremated stays packing containers ended up within the USPS’s warehouse for misplaced packages. In keeping with the report, “as of February 27, 2023, the MRC [Mail Recovery Center] had 452 undeliverable and/or unidentifiable Cremated Stays packages,” the oldest being there since February 24, 2015.
Whereas there’s nothing to worry from human stays, it’s a sorry destiny to spend your ultimate resting place bouncing across the federal system. Such packages are speculated to be clearly marked as needing further care whereas dealing with, however the USPS examine discovered this wasn’t all the time the case. Even when packages had been clearly marked, they weren’t all the time dealt with appropriately by employees in postal amenities. Misplaced packages find yourself on the Mail Restoration Heart, a form of Misplaced and Discovered for undeliverable packages. Often packages that linger within the MRC for over 60 days are then both thrown away or auctioned off on the GovDeals web site if they’re price over $25.
That is luckily not the case with human stays. However since nobody fairly is aware of what to do with the undeliverable stays, they simply stack up.
The report makes suggestions and factors out good practices from among the publish places of work, however there appears to be no rapid answer or decision for the 452 human stays misplaced within the machines of presidency.
