Postal Service Daze

Posted by: on Apr 28, 2015 | No Comments

POSTAL SERVICE DAZE

Postmarked March 30th. Delivered April 26th.

Postmarked March 30th.
Delivered April 27th.

When it comes to excuses, “the check is in the mail” is right up there with the dog ate my homework. Oh sure, it’s possible…it’s just not all that likely…or is it? Yesterday I received the envelope above in the mail from one my SU alumni club members. She swore that she had mailed the check at the end of March. I’m thinking maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. All I knew was that I had not received. And then I did, 4 weeks after she mailed the check from Fair Lawn, NJ, to my office in Millburn, NJ. 28 daze to travel 24 miles via the US Postal Service.

Was this an isolated incident? Hell no. At the beginning of February, I got a call from a friend of Linda’s and mine, asking me would I be willing to be a Saturday morning usher at temple the day of her son’s bar mitzvah? And oh by the way, were Linda and I coming. I told her I would be happy to usher. As for coming, I couldn’t recall seeing an invitation. “Of course you’re invited” was her response. “I’ll send out another invite today.” She did, we got it in a day or two, and guess what showed up a week later, 5 weeks after being mailed? The first invite, which was mailed at the Millburn Post Office, in the same town we live, just a different zip code. 5 weeks to travel 3 miles from the post office to our house.

Now we get to the mystery of the returned envelope. Going back to the alumni club, we are running a pizza tour in NYC, with Scott’s Pizza Tours (who just so happens to be an SU alum himself). I sent the deposit check off to Scott at his NYC office on March 12th. On March 25th, the USPS returned the envelope to me as undeliverable, only it was, or at least it should have been. The address was perfectly fine (I sent a picture to Scott to verify) and I couldn’t find any reason why the envelope shouldn’t have been delivered, only it wasn’t.  Within less than 3 months, I had been victim of some pretty strange service from the post office. There’s a “going postal” line in here somewhere but I’m going to leave that alone.

So the next time someone tells you “the check is in the mail,” they might just be telling you the truth. As for the dog eating the homework, you might just have to wait to get the straight poop on that one (and I can’t believe I wrote that).