Well, you’re going to get TWO. BECAUSE THIS WAS MY DAY.
Now, I keep my PO box year round, but most of the year, I check it like, once a month to clear out the grocery circulars. I get a letter or two any month not immediately surrounding Christmas/my birthday.
For this reason, despite my tiny tiny mailbox, my Post office does not ever give me a box key. They only have like, twelve parcel pickup slots, and they can’t waste one on me, if I’m never going to show up. Instead, they put a yellow “You’ve got Big Mail!” card in my box, and when I come in, I bring it to the front counter, and they get my package from the back.
This… Is important.
So, this is the time of year when I visit at least twice a week, and the last few weeks before Christmas, every other weekday to clear out anything in my box. But this year, I’ve gone in to find maybe one or two cards waiting for me the entire season. Which is way, WAY down from what I got last year.
So this week, I’d pretty much given up. I hadn’t gone all week until today, choosing to drop my cards off before work rather than waste my lunch break driving over for no reason. Today, I go in, I find the usual like, three cards waiting, and plod back out to the parking lot.
As I’m getting to my car, someone drives up next to me and rolls down the window. It’s the guy who usually works mornings. He’s been gone by the time I get home, but he knows me, at least a bit. And he leans out of his car and says, “I don’t want to be rude, but you’ve got to pick up your stuff, it’s getting out of control.”
Me: (stares blankly at him) What stuff?
Him: The stuff in the back.
Me: (very slowly) There wasn’t a slip.
Him: (stares blankly at me)
Me: (stares blankly back)
Him: (puts car in reverse, rolls back into the employee lot, gets out of his car, and strides back into the post office)
At this point, I’m just confused, but I’m willing to roll with it. I go inside after him, just in time to see him coming out of the back with a literal rolling bin of mail.
It’s all my mail.
Because they got a new sorter, who knew I didn’t come in often. And she started stacking stuff up, with the assumption that there was ALREADY A SLIP IN MY BOX. Because why wouldn’t there be? I don’t come in. Like. At all.
So all this time, only the late deliveries have been making it into my box. The main mail shipment, she’s been putting EVERYTHING INTO THE BIN.
AND THAT’S WHY I HAD NO FRICKIN’ MAIL FOR THE LAST MONTH.
Story 2, best told by a sequence of texts from Sam as he attempts to track his Christmas present which I mailed him two weeks ago.
And that was my day of FUN WITH THE US POSTAL SERVICE.
The exact phrase from the post office customer service agent I spoke to (after forty very soothing minutes of synthpop jazz instrumental christmas carol hold music) was “It was fully engulfed in flame.”
The other day I answered the door to my postman. I was signing for stuff, like you do, when my kid came downstairs with only his underwear and a t-shirt on.
Now, the postman couldn’t see him from the front door, and I scribbled my signature and said, to my son, “You need to put some trousers on.”
My postman, very slowly, looked down at his trouser-clad legs with a mixture of confusion and horror, and then looked back up at me.
When I explained I was talking to my little boy out of his line of sight, he gave a very solemn nod and said: “I thought I’d put trousers on this morning, but suddenly when you said that, I really wasn’t sure.”
Years after this, I still have the same postman. He still always wears trousers, but every time I answer the door, I’m pretty sure we both remember this incident.
Steel Phoenix Studios 