I have a moral…

I have a moral dilemma.

Yesterday, the UPS guy delivered a copy of what is clearly the latest Harry Potter book to our building -- addressed to a resident who moved out a month ago. Dave must have set up mail forwarding for his regular mail, but that didn't help him with Amazon pre-orders. Someone in the building *might* have his forwarding address, but more likely to work would be putting the book in the U.S. Mail, addressed to this address, and then letting mail forwarding take care of it. Of course, that takes effort, and costs some money for postage.

So here's the question: if I'm willing to go to all that trouble to get the man his book, am I justified in opening the package and reading it first? It's sitting on top of our mailboxes downstairs right now, taunting me. And I do have a couple of plane trips coming up...

Yes, I know what the right thing to do is. But I don't have to like it.

6 thoughts on “I have a moral…”

  1. A less costly and equally ethical thing to do, in my opinion, is to mark it “addressee unknown; return to sender” and drop it by the nearest UPS store. But, in your shoes I would probably do what you suggested first and drop it in US mail.

  2. Your former neighbor is probably trying to work with UPS and/or amazon to find out where the package went. If you call UPS and report the problem, they’ll pick it up, and it might help him straighten it all out.

    also, in addition to the moral issue, opening the package yourself is likely to be illegal — mail tampering and all.

  3. ?? I thought mail tampering laws applied only to items sent by US mail, not to anything delivered by anyone else such as UPS. But, it would be best to err on the side of caution.

  4. Mary Anne Mohanraj

    All has been resolved — the book has disappeared from the mailboxes. So either some other neighbor has given in to temptation, or someone else has been good and found a way to send it on to Dave. Either way, it’s out of my hands now, which is probably for the best. 🙂

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