Sometimes postcards look like they had a really rough travel. With this card, I had to be thankful that it arrived at all…
This is what I hoped to recieve:
This is what arrived in my mailbox, tucked in a plastic bag:
On top, all the stamps had fallen off. 
Was the postcard in a flood? In a fight? Did it travel with a hungry tiger? I don’t know… 
I have no mailbox horror story of my own (thank God!) , but I can share with you something that happened to a friend of mine. He used to collect vinyl records and often bought them online. One time he got sent one in a really slim package, barely larger and thicker that a record sleeve - and the mailman folded it in half to fit it into the mailbox. 
How he can not have realized he broke the record is beyond me. I mean, it’s not like a magazine or something, there’s resistance there! My friend was a bit scared of buying vinyls online after that. 
Oh wow! That makes for a really interesting story to share. I’m guessing it was licked by a large cat 
I was looking for an emoji for shaking one’s head but I couldn’t find one. I don’t think I will order vinyls online anytime soon.
Looks like it might have gotten wet and attached itself to another card! How awful though.
Reminds me of the envelopes the stamps I ordered arrives in. I usually buy directly from the post’s own webshop and they always have a big “do not fold” sticker / text, especially if I have bought anything that is considered as a collectible. They do not trust on their own either…
My mailbox is identical to several others in our row. The only difference is the house number. There is a place inside the mailbox door to write your family name to help the mail carrier make sure it’s the correct box.
Well, one day I decided to finally put the family name inside the mailbox door — only to find that my next door neighbor had written their family name in my mailbox!!! I wonder how much of my mail was returned because of the wrong name on the box.
I have no idea how long the wrong name was in there, and I still don’t understand how a person could write their name in the wrong numbered mailbox (the neighbor has lived there since 1998!)
Luckily I don’t have any real horror stories.
But a few annoyances.
1: Mail that does not arrive.
All the effort was then for nothing. I clearly write the address. Check everything 3 times. Always stick enough stamps. And then that card doesn’t arrive… Where is such a card?
The unnecessary sticking of large stickers on the cards. About the address and about the text.
When I gently peel them off, the card sticks. And then I see that there was NOTHING wrong with the address. Everything was good and clear. Then why those terrible stickers?
Damage to cards. That is also a pity. Received a beautiful maxi card with cuddly rabbits this week. But there was a hole in the card.
And got this card today.
I take a picture of the front (damage) and of the back so you can see which stickers I mean.
(I put the 2 white strips on top to shield the address)
I suspect that was done by a postal worker rather than your neighbor accessing your box.
To answer #2: PostNL uses these stickers when mail is sorted wrong; it doesn’t have anything to do with the address itself. My tip: complain every time.
Pretty sure it was neighbor: I opened his mailbox door (the doors are not locked, they open to a slot that is locked), and the same name in the same scrawl was there. I think they wrote in the wrong box, eventually discovered their mistake and wrote in the right box but never crossed out the name on the wrong box.
Last summer, a new postman appeared at my local office, and he seemed to hate delivering postcards. Three times he left a pile of my postcards just on the pavement near the entrance (I live in an apartment building, and the mailboxes are inside the entrance). I’m sure some of them were lost. When I went to the post office to find out why he was doing this, he assured me that he put everything in a box, that it was the neighbors who selected a skeleton key to my box and threw the postcards out into the street. What an imagination! I know all my neighbors, and they all are decent people. So I had to rent a PO box at the post office. Thank God that evil man quit (or was fired) this summer, and new postman is good. He confirmed my suspicions about the previous postman and said that he did not deliver part of the mail at all, but threw it away or left it lying in a desk drawer in the post office. I have only read previously about such cases, and now it happened to me. Now everything is fine, but I continue to rent a PO box, because postmen often change, and there is no guarantee that the same terrible “worker” will not come.
I was around 9 or 10 years old at the time and tried to sneak in a violent movie on TV without my parents knowing. There was a scene where the victim opens the door and gets a shotgun blast in the face or something like that. To this day some forty years later, I still stand to the side before opening my mailbox!
I had a regular customer in my USPS days who sold vinyls online. He packed them into big thick flat boxes you couldn’t bend if you tried. On the other hand there were people who’d try to send a Ming vase or something and to save a few grams worth of postage would do just like whoever sold your friend his records, no protective packaging. But still, what on earth was that postman thinking!!!
I have received stamps that were cancelled like this too. What I do is take a cotton swab (like for cleaning ears) and wet it with a drop of 70% ethanol. I get mine at the pharmacy and mostly use it for dissolving tough labels off glass or metal. With the wet cotton swab I gently wipe off as much of the pen ink as I can, taking care not to smear it any further. Once the surface of the swab is covered in ink I take a new one and repeat the process until no more ink can be lifted from the stamp. A faint outline of the pen markings will probably remain, but I have “rescued” several nice stamps this way.
I know it’s small consolation after all the effort you went to, but perhaps you can still salvage the stamps.
This reminds me of a friend who told me at that same age they watched a Bela Lugosi Dracula movie and to this day doesn’t like hearing anything relating to vampires.
Our postbox has been teeming with unwelcome lodgers this summer. Ants, earwigs, spiders, and BIG spider (who doesn’t seem to eat earwigs). I evict one invertebrate and something new moves in. I am just coexisting with Big spider and the earwigs now. Eventually Minnesota winter will end this…,
Yikes, that would creep me out. Out of curiosity, how do they get in there? Is the postbox enclosed?
