sorry to hear about your troubles with the postal service, a lot of problems come the post office management making people work so fast so they can save money.

as in the dash that was forgotten about, most post offices have an area of shelves set up for parcels that have been left notice, say the parcel is set in a different place because it doesnt fit on the shelf, they go through the shelves everyday and write reminder notices for people to come pick their package up after it has been there a certain amount time, but if this is in a different spot this might not happen, one of the big problems though is the "left notice" slips, these things are miniature and this causes them to be lost or dropped, sometimes people dont even know they get them because they get stuck to other pieces of mail. on lost items, really, on pacels, its way under 1%, the reason the post office is so bad at tracking is because of the lack of automation on their tracking, its almost all done by hand. on something scanned delivered thats not, i can say the biggest reason that happens is the scanners are set up where when you scan an item, the delivered selection is right next to the attemped selection, with the scanners being sooo slow, they run windows on them, and us having to work so fast, we dont have time to wait on the scanner so you think you hit the right key combination and you might pick delivered and not know it.

and finally on the magazines being shredded, this is a big problem right now in the post office, this has to do with the automated sorting machines that the post office is starting to deploy. the overwhelming majority of stuff goes through fine, but depending on the cover of the magazine and the thickness of the magazine sometimes the machine decides it wants a magazine for lunch and eats it, or a large portion of it, like today i noticed about 3 or 4 covers where, i only had the cover page with the address on it, the rest of the magazine was missing.