The weather in Alabama, where reader Alison lives, has been extremely warm lately. If she lived in an old cartoon, mercury would be bursting out of the top of the thermometers. With temperatures of about one hundred degrees every day, she doesn’t really blame her mail carrier for not wanting to get up. However, what takes more work: walking to the porch, or shoving a package in the mailbox so firmly that the customer can’t get it out?

Here’s a picture that she took after she tore open the box to remove its contents.

“I pulled on the box so hard that Amazon’s secure tape ripped off and I was able open the box, but the box itself didn’t budge,” she writes. You can see the rest of her mail wedged off to the side, which she couldn’t get to. She had to bring scissors outside to cut the box up and get it out.

Her items weren’t harmed exactly, but they could have been. She plans to report the problem to her local post office, and thinks there may have been a substitute mail carrier that day.

As a one-off incident, this isn’t a big deal, especially since the package contents weren’t harmed. However, if her carrier were an habitual offender and the local post office didn’t do anything about it, she could try contacting the Office of the Inspector General, the outside agency that ensures that the U.S. Postal Service is behaving itself.

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