Everybody complains about mail delivery. But it's amazing that the United States Postal Service can deliver billions of pieces of mail and have so many of them get to the proper destination in a couple of days or less.

Even with the rise of electronic bill pay services, USPS delivers checks daily to ensure that our payments get credited promptly to our creditors and banks. Sometimes that happens despite circumstances against them doing it.

I use electronic bill-pay; but some payments, I make by traditional check. In March, I received one of the typical paper bank statements and sent my payment by mail, with the confidence that it would arrive on time as usual. But when my April statement arrived, I was surprised that it showed no payments having been applied to my account, and that the bank had applied a $35 late fee.

I promptly picked up the phone and informed Jackie, the customer support rep who answered my call, that I had mailed it 10 days in advance of the due date. She said she would note my account (with hopes that it wouldn't hit my credit report as a nonpayment), but she would not be able to credit the late fee until a new check came in.

To avoid problems, I promptly issued another check, but I wondered what might have happened to my original check. The answer came in early May, in the form of a letter from Lionel Snow, the manager of the USPS Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta. It read:

"You recently mailed a letter that we were unable to deliver or return. When this occurs, the letter is sent to a Mail Recovery Center where employees are authorized to open the mail to determine if address information is available to return to the rightful owner."

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but have never seen such a letter, and had not known of such activities. The letter went on to tell me that the Postal Service has recently installed imaging equipment specifically to expedite the return of undeliverable checks -- and there was a picture of my check near the bottom of the page! It apparently took a detour after the envelope became undeliverable, though I wasn't told why or how it was undeliverable.

Mr. Snow went on to express his regrets that the letter did not arrive at the destination, and assured me that the scanned image was not retained by the Postal Service and that the check had been shredded after it was scanned -- to make sure that my personal information would be protected.

In essence, an astute Postal Service employee pulled the address off my check and used new USPS policies and technology to make sure that I, the sender, was not harmed.

With the letter in hand, I was able to phone the bank, inform it about what happened, and get the late fee and finance charges (which by that point had accrued in two billing periods) credited back to my account.

Normally, when we think of how technology is used in delivery of letters and packages, we think of big sorting machines that read characters or bar codes. We think of the scanners they use when they pick up our packages and the touch-screens with styli that we use to sign for packages that arrive. And of course, we think of the way we can use the Internet to track our shipments en route to their destinations. Even as I love these technologies, I now found my new favorite -- because it protects us behind the scenes from the problems that can happen due to nobody's fault in particular.