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KEY TAKEAWAYS
- A Taylorsville woman faced weeks-long delays accessing her mailbox due to USPS.
- Diane Shipp waited for a car title but couldn’t get mailbox keys.
- USPS resolved the issue after media intervention, citing a lock backorder.
TAYLORSVILLE — Not every piece of U.S. mail we get is junk mail, so imagine not having access to your mailbox for weeks without end in sight. It happened to a Taylorsville woman.
For weeks and weeks, Diane Shipp has been anxiously waiting for a car title to show up in the mail. But there’s a problem.
“I cannot get keys for the mailbox,” Shipp said.
Her mail gets delivered to a cluster box at her apartment complex. When she moved in at the start of February, the landlord told her she’d have to get the key to her box directly from the U.S. post office.
Shipp said she went the next day and spoke to the postmaster.
2 more weeks
“He informed me it would be a couple of weeks,” Shipp said.
She said those two weeks got stretched into another two weeks. And then another two weeks after that.
“He calls me and continually tells me a couple more weeks, a couple more weeks,” Shipp said.
Shipp said that she has spoken to the postmaster multiple times. At first, she said he simply asked for patience. After a couple of weeks, he told her that the post office needed to replace the lock on her mailbox, but that they couldn’t because they did not have any.
Six weeks in, Shipp reached her breaking point, so she decided to Get Gephardt.
“It shouldn’t be this difficult to get my keys for the mailbox,” she said.
The KSL Investigators reached out to the U.S. Postal Service, and it responded within hours. In an email, a spokesperson told us the postal service “strives to always provide the best possible service.”
The USPS attributed the delay to a backorder on new locks. Still, the very day KSL reached out to it, the USPS told us, “… management changed Ms. Shipp’s lock and provided her with the keys.”
And just like that, she finally has access to her mail again. Though she’ll tell you she shouldn’t have had to Get Gephardt.
“It just shouldn’t have, but I appreciate you guys,” she said.
Getting help
If you’re having issues with your U.S. mail, the USPS said you can contact your local post office, call 1-800-ASK-USPS (800-275-8777) or use its website, www.usps.com/help.
Photos
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.