Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

NEW January 2, 2014

I have the laziest mailman.

Now a few thoughts may be racing through your mind:
1- “No, I have the laziest mailman.”
2- “Isn’t ‘lazy mailman’ an oxymoron?”
3- “Get on with it, Mr. Blog.”

My household gets packages delivered a couple of time a week. (Is it drugs? Are we getting illegal drugs? C’mon, I would not admit to receiving illegal drugs through the mail in this blog. Wink wink.) We know what time the mail comes and even if we have to rush out of the apartment due to fire we stay inside and brave death by smoke inhalation because if we miss the mailman, we’ll have to the post office to pick up the package and who wants to go there? The post office is the home base of… postal workers!

Well my mailman has gotten lazy lately and instead of, you know, delivering packages and doing his job, he just leaves a slip in the mailbox and makes me go to pick it up.

That is not this story.

My brother had sent me a package for my birthday, December 11^th. The estimated delivery date was December 8^th. I only knew about this later. Well, the 8^th came and went, no package. The 11^th came and went, no package. The 20^th came and went, no package, but by now my brother decided to track the package. “What,” you may ask, “did he wait nine days for?” Good question. I have no idea. Anyway, he went to Amazon, where he ordered it, and found that they shipped it via FedEx. They claimed that they tried to deliver it on the 8^th but no one was home. LIE! I was home all day on the 8^th and I would have gotten the package had they tried to deliver it. Which they did not. FedEx further said that they left it at my local post office, which is where the fun begins.

Good job on FedEx, by the way. Tools.

Did my post office:
1- Try to deliver the package? No.
2- Leave me a slip telling me they had the package and I should pick it up? No.
3- Put I in a big pile of boxes and forget about it? Yes. Surprised?

So the next day my brother and I trekked down to the post office to get the package.

Depending on your sensibility, please pick either the POLITE POLITICALLY CORRECT sentence or the BLUNT BUT ACCURATE sentence.

POLITE POLITICALLY CORRECT: The demographics of my neighborhood have changed over the years, so that there is a diverse array of languages spoken here.

BLUNT BUT ACCURATE: No one around here speaks English anymore.

I went to the post office and, after a not too long wait, a miracle in itself, I was at the window and explained to the woman on the other side that FedEx left a package here for me a week ago. I gave her my name and address.

She asked for my tracking number. I told her I only had the FedEx tracking number. She said “tracking number!” I told her it was a FedEx number, not from the post office. She said “tracking number!” so what the hell, I gave it to her.

She left and went to look for the box. After almost ten minutes she came back and said something to the effect of “knad weh [quj’hvuipoh guiah,” which, with some gesticulations and doodles, my brother and I correctly interpreted to mean “this is not our tracking number.”

I was very angry- no, let’s be honest, I was pissed off. She then, with the same sort of proto-English and gestures, told me to put the information into the computerized postal kiosk and get the information from there. I already knew the outcome but for the sake of owning the moral high ground I did so and of course, it did not recognize the tracking number.

I went back to the window and explained it all to her again, emphasizing that it WAS NOT A POST OFFICE TRACKING NUMBER. She then, and I swear this is true, took out a ruler and used it to write the numbers in a nice straight line. Next, using the ruler, she grouped them in sets of four. Lastly, counting with, yes, the ruler, she came to the conclusion that there were, and I’ll translate it for you, “not enough numbers.” This tracking number had 16 numbers while the USPS tracking numbers use 18.

You know why there were not enough numbers? BECAUSE IT WAS NOT A POST OFFICE TRACKING NUMBER.

But, being a brave little brain cell, she went back to look for the package again and, believe it or not, almost another ten minutes later, she found it and hold on to your hat, it was in a stack directly in my line of sight. I was looking at it the whole time.

But wait! There’s more!

When FedEx passed it off to the post office, the post office added their own tracking number. They created that number by taking the 16 FedEx numbers and adding 2 more to the end.

In other words, the postal worker had:
My name
My address
The first 16 out of 18 tracking numbers

So why was it so hard to find the box?????? Did she see it but, with only a 99.9% match of information, decide it was not the right package? What is so special about the last two numbers? I can only assume that that woman is a total and utter ass.

I got the package and as I left she tried to tell me that next time I had to have the right tracking numbers. I wasn’t sticking around to listen but I was pissed off so I turned back and yelled (yes, I raised my voice) “none of that explains why this was sitting here for a week and no one tried to deliver it or even let us know it was here!”

I hate the post office.

Tags: Amazon, bmj2k, cliff clavin, famous mailmen, FedEx, mail, mailman, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, Mr. BTR, Newman, post office, postal, Son of Sam, special delivery