In England, 1,600 Royal Mail staff have been caught stealing in the last five years. That means that on any given day a postman (or woman) is stealing someone’s paycheck, someone’s refund, someone’s message to an old friend or Jury Duty assignment or catalogue or lingerie purchase or father’s last letter to his son forgiving him for that thing that happened down at the beach house forty years ago.

In 2006, Royal Mail’s 29-year-old Shaun Angell was found with 2,548 letters and packets of undelivered mail. He used the money he found in the letters to buy crack. When Paul Noga, 38, failed to deliver over 76,000 letters and packages to the mail recipients along his Northumberland route from 2007-2009, the police discovered that his apartment had become so overcrowded with stolen packages that he was forced to relocate into his mother’s basement. I wonder what she told her friends.

But mail theft doesn’t only occur over the pond. Mailperson David Blauser, 41, of Northeast Philadelphia, stole over 20,000 letters, including hundreds of college acceptance letters. So now I know that I really did get into Middlebury. And, in Minneapolis, a mailman was recently charged with stealing mail from at least 250 victims staying at the Ronald McDonald House.

Now, sometimes a doddering aunt might send you an empty care package because she has forgotten to put anything in it, or a friend might lie and tell you she sent you a postcard from Spain when she was actually just getting wasted the whole time. It is also conceivable that an insensitive, exploitive ex-boyfriend will tell you that he sent you a box full of all those items that you really want back—like your favorite pair of jeans, your truly superb collection of CDs, and that picture frame you made for him back while you were together and you could stand to look at him—when he actually kept everything and is listening to your Talking Heads CD with his arm languidly draped around some toad-faced girl. These things happen.

However, while these scenarios might be possible, we also shouldn’t forget to cast blame wherever else it might be able to land. Striding down the street, bronzed by the sun, strengthened by the cold, our mail carriers hold our lives in their mailbags and take from those bags what they choose, often deigning to deliver unto us only the pieces of mail which seem insignificant enough to be a bill or one of those application forms for a credit card with 35% interest rates. And that’s probably why I still haven’t received any letters back from Bradley Cooper.