Myself, I'm willing to cut the PO some slack. They're taking a beating lately by Congress and it's not fair. The bit about having to prefund retirement for 75 years is
insane. They're being forced to set aside money for employees that haven't even been
born yet. No company nor other government agency is being forced to do anything that nuts.
Also, I do know they have been upgrading their tracking system lately. It's becoming more detailed and informative. At the same time, there have been glitches. It's a huge system. Upgrading it is going to be bumpy.
Some of the reports of packages "bouncing" between locations aren't actually real. That is, in the
sense, the package did not actually go anywhere. The tracking system sometimes seems to get records out of order. When the upgrade happened, I had packages "arrive" at facilities before they "departed". Then after they finally "departed", the vendor delivered them to the PO to ship. Wait... what? Time travel?
In recent orders, they've gotten much better. Right down to I don't "stalk" the mail man anymore. I get a "delivered" notice in email within an hour of him putting the package in the box. In fact, my Wizard order was too big to fix the mailbox and he brought it to the door. The computer when Ding! as he drove off. So I got the delivery notice within minutes of the actual, physical delivery. Which ain't bad.
(Better than both FedEx and UPS actually)
From what I've seen (computer and network geek I am), the system they're upgrading to is pretty snazzy. But they're still working out some kinks.
Given the billions (for real) items they process every year, it's kind of amazing the system works at all...