I'm really unsure who I should be cheesed off at: the USPS in general, my mail carrier in specific, amazon.com, or my dad. Actually, all's well that ends well, so I'm really not angry with anyone anymore. But, you know, blame must be affixed!
I got home from work yesterday to find the postman had left me one of those little postcards saying they could not deliver my package, because it was too big to fit in the package slot of our communal mailbox. And I could pick it up at the post office today after 9am. Not even the post office near my house, either. The big, main post office, which is nowhere near either my house or my office or, really, anyplace that I was planning to go any time in the next week.
My dad swore up and down that the mailman did not ring the bell; that he (my dad) in fact saw the mailman driving away after delivering the post, which means that he was not napping and he would have heard the door bell. Really! Of course the fact that prior to going out to see if the mail had come, he was watching TV in his bedroom, with the volume turned up to 126, couldn't mean that he didn't hear the bell. No. But, be that as it may, I did not understand why the mailman didn't just drop the package in front of the door if no one answered. It's been done before. Certainly UPS and FedEx have no problem with it, either. (Nor do I. School's out; there are no possibly-larcenous soccer moms in their SUVs lurking at the bottom of the street. I think my packages are safe.)
So then I thought, well, perhaps it's the b-day present I ordered from etsy for L, and the seller was super-paranoid about people claiming not to have received her merchandise, so she shipped signature required or something. Which would be a major pain in my ass, but I thought it was possible, and I was ready to excuse the mail carrier. I go online and track the various packages I am expecting and I realize that, no, it's not L's b-day present. It's the remainder of my amazon order I've been waiting for. Believe me, and as I'm sure you probably know, free super-saver shipping doesn't ever require a signature. Grr.
So, anyway, there was nothing I could do about it last night, because the post office was long since closed. And on closer examination of the postcard, the wording was a little vague. There was something about re-delivery, even though it was clearly telling me to pick my box up at the post office. So I threw it into my bag and at 10:30 today, when I was finished with my first couple patients, I called the post office. The gentleman there assured me that, no, they used to try to re-deliver but "they don't do that anymore." So, in other words, get your ass down here during normal business hours when most people have to work, and get your box. So very glad the postal increases are going to better, improved service.
I hang up and I realize I have a huge hole in my schedule due to a cancellation and something having been scheduled for more time than it took, and I make the executive decision to take a long, long, (long) lunch and go on a field trip to get my package. I feel somewhat guilty about this, but also defensive, because I never do it, unlike some people around here who are always taking off for two hour long doctor's appointments or their kids' doctor's appointments or to pay their cell phone bills or god knows what else when they're on the clock. So I take my entitled and somewhat cranky ass to the post office. It's a nice day. The weather is fine. I'm soon enjoying playing my little bit of hooky.
The lady at the post office asks for neither a signature nor any ID, which...why didn't we just drop the box in front of the front door again? Explain this? And it's a very huge box, with two tiny, tiny little books in it. Oh, thank you, amazon.com. This is why it wouldn't fit in the package slot. Sigh. Save a tree and my aggravation next time and use a little less cardboard, huh?
So. All this is someone's fault and that someone is not me (except that I was supporting the economy like a good consumer, which is exactly what I think my federal government has been telling me to do, so you know?)
Hmmpphhh.
xoxo
6 comments:
You haven't made a list in a long, long time, so maybe if we all promise not to mock your list-making, you could make one and apportion blame on a sliding scale. That would be fair, unless of course, you don't want to be fair.
oh.my.god.
You're absolutely right. It's been *ages* since I made a list. That (bad) habit has apparently been broken.
Who said I can't be trained? :-)
I think M-A can pretty much blame Amazon for going with the cheapest possible delivery service, one with unionized government workers and a monopoly on first class mail so they really just don't have to try so hard...
Plus M-A can also blame Amazon for putting her little books in an unnecessarily huge box so it wouldn't fit in her mailbox. I've experienced that myself... Does it really make Amazon that much more efficient to only use a few fairly large box sizes on their packing line rather than smaller boxes, or even Tyvek envelopes, and save shipping a lot of empty space? (I assume the answer is yes or they wouldn't do it all the time--Amazon certainly knows what they're doing-- but it still seems weird to ship all that empty air all over the country and instead pack their boxes in tighter.)
On the other hand, it was M-A's parsimonious choice to use free SuperSaver shipping rather than pay for a real delivery service that actually tries harder. So I'm not so sure the apportionment might not turn right around and point back at her. Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. ;-)
Mock my parsimonious ways if you must, but after perusing my super-saver'd reading materials, I'll sleep soundly on my 60% off 800-thread count sheets tonight in my half-price Wacoal, dreaming about the healthy balance in my checking account :-PPPPPP
So we have 1) Amazon with a USPS assist, 2) Amazon solo for dumbass packaging, and a contested 3) for M-A being, um, economical. That's a start. As resident spokesman for old guys, I'm for letting your dad off easy. You can blame USPS for not ringing the bell enough.
As is well known, The Postman Always Rings Twice, so you surely can't blame USPS!
Or at least they rang twice in the '30s. Probably in the last 70 years some efficiency expert realized that the time taken to ring twice, multiplied by tens of millions of deliveries a day, meant thousands of extra employees needed to make up the time taken for all of those second bell ringings, and thus mandated only a single short ring.
I think back then they also delivered twice a day, and on Sundays too. Obviously the rise of inadequate postal service pretty much presaged the decline of American world hegemony. Someone should start a movement to bring back proper bell-ringing!
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