A month or so ago, a reader we're calling Brie was doing
some gardening in the front yard of her house, which sits in a city
neighborhood. About an hour into her work, Brie's next-door neighbor walked up
to her with a stack of mail and told her that it had been delivered to her
house by mistake.
"I meant to get these to you earlier," the
neighbor told Brie. "But time just got away from me." The neighbor
apologized, said she would try to be swifter in redelivering misdelivered mail
in the future and walked away.
In the stack of a dozen or so envelopes were
advertisements, a holiday card, a save-the-date card, and a handful of bills
from a variety of utility companies. (Yes, some people including Brie still
receive bills in hard copy by mail rather than online via email.) When Brie had
a chance to examine the pile more closely, she saw that some of the mail dated
back almost a year and a half.
Brie was upset that her neighbor never took the time to
give her the mail. She was even more upset that it took her neighbor over a
year to tell her about the mail. Brie now understood why a telephone bill she
received a while back indicated she had missed a month's payment and why she
had had to call a credit card company to ask it to forgive a late payment fee.
When the neighborhood's regular mail deliverer is on
vacation, mail is often delivered to the wrong address. Other neighbors have
regularly dropped off mail intended for Brie. Brie has done the same for them,
including her next door neighbor.
"Now, I'm concerned," writes Brie. "What
if she begins to stack up more of my mail and fails to get it to me for another
year?"
Brie knows that her neighbor lives alone and travels for
work quite a bit, so it's understandable that mail might pile up. Brie doesn't
understand why the neighbor hasn't taken the time to be thoughtful by making
sure she redirects any mail she mistakenly receives.
The postal service is responsible for the wrongly
delivered mail, of course, and Brie and her neighbors should regularly report
when mail is delivered to the wrong house. But Brie's neighbor should try
harder to set things right when she can.
"Our mailboxes are not locked, so it would be simple
for me to thumb through her mail to make sure nothing of mine is mixed in with
hers," writes Brie. "Would this be wrong?"
Yes, going through someone else's mail without permission
would be wrong. Brie can also choose to receive bills online, although she
shouldn't have to do this because a neighbor is hoarding her mail. It would not
be wrong for Brie to occasionally ask her neighbor if she received any mail
meant for Brie. It also wouldn't be wrong for Brie to notify the post office
whenever she receives wrongly delivered mail if she's truly worried about
receiving bills on time.
The right thing is for the postal carrier, even the one
covering for vacations, to deliver mail to the right house and for neighbors to
be as thoughtful to one another as they would hope neighbors would be toward
them.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.
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