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A 'high priority' open letter to Canada Post

Dear Canada Post, Hey, it's me, Christopher. Long-time user, first-time letter writer. Not really sure where to begin with this so I'll just say it: your service kind of sucks.

I know, I know, it sounds a bit harsh but hear me out. I've been a customer of yours for the past 20 or so years with the same community mailbox with nary an issue. That is, until this past week.

On Friday, I came home to find that our community mailbox had been broken into and cleaned out. Most of the doors were open and everyone's boxes exposed and most had been emptied.

Doing what most people would do, I called up you up and reported it right away. The guy on the other end of the phone sounded surprised and noted he would deem it a "high priority" for whoever is supposed to deal with these kinds of things.

Call me crazy, but I always thought "high priority" would translate to "relatively soon." Instead, it took nearly four days for the locks to be changed and even longer (as in still waiting) to hear what happened to the mail that was supposed to be delivered in the meantime or when our service would actually be back to normal.

I don't know if you're aware, but mail is pretty important to people. You see, anytime you have a service that carries sensitive personal information you might want to do things that give people confidence in your services.

You're entrusted with guarding people's private information and, in an age when email and third-party courier services are increasingly popular, it's up to you to show us why we should still use you.

Don't get me wrong, your customer services reps are nice enough people on the phone but don't really seem aware of what they can do, other than to promise that issues like the aforementioned are deemed "high priority."

Granted, I may be a bit upset but, well, I guess I expected better. I get that you're

(supposedly) pretty strapped for cash of late but I'd hope at the very least the security of people's personal information was important enough to do something about.

You could argue that I should have seen this coming, as most of the other community mailboxes in my neighbourhood have already been hit by thefts. In those instances, the mailboxes were completely replaced and the old brown ones were curbed in favour of a fancier-looking (and hopefully more secure) grey one.

I guess ours was the last of the old type of mailboxes in the neighbourhood, probably because it had yet to be broken into. Looking at the rest of the subdivision, I have to wonder if you were simply waiting for an incident like this to occur before deeming it necessary to install the newer styled box?

If so, that's kind of crappy. Even worse, I guess, would be to just keep the old style boxes knowing that they've been broken into once before.

You're also going to be rolling out community mailboxes to more of Canada in the coming months and I wonder what you'll be telling people who are worried about this exact situation happening to them?

Anyhow, it's going on day five of having no idea what's going on or what's happening to our mail. I suppose we should be grateful you've deemed this to be a "high priority" issue, but forgive me if have no idea what that's supposed to mean.

Sincerely, Christopher Poon.

Christopher Poon is a reporter and photographer with the Now.