Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I'm going to take a break from a) the various things I ought to be doing and b) the more difficult political entry I'm in the middle of working on (which I want to phrase very carefully, and which I've started and abandoned three times in the past couple months), to toss out something easy to write: a complaint about my local Post Office.

Different letter carriers do the route my house is on on different days -- I'm not sure whether there's a pattern or not. At least one is conscientious, helpful, and friendly and goes out of her way to make things work right -- like seeing a pink reminder slip for a parcel waiting for me at the post office, and telling the sorter, "Oh just give me the package -- I know he'll be home today". At least one other is friendly and conscientious and does what he's supposed to do regarding parcels, and I've no idea whether he goes out of his way or simply does his job cheerfully. And at least one is a lazy clown who tries to avoid ever delivering a parcel.

I was home all day Friday, and while it is possible that I slept through the doorbell, that's rather unlikely. Still, I'll give whichever carrier left the pink "sorry we missed you" slip that day the benefit of the doubt even though I know that in the past those slips have been left without even the pretense of reaching for the doorbell button (God forbid the mailman should ever have to actually ascend anybody's front stair to reach the bell!). So I simply filled in the "please redeliver on..." section, asking for delivery today (because with the whole ride situation over the weekend I wasn't sure whether I'd be home yesterday at that point), and left it tucked into the edge of the mail slot where it could be collected when Saturday's mail was delivered. I didn't even snark about the carrier's failure to fill in the "sender" box on the slip to give me a clue what parcel it might be.

Saturday's mail was pushed right past the slip, which was still there when the rain started, and got rather beaten up by the weather. (I've had this happen before; one of the carriers on my route goes to great lengths to avoid disturbing a "please redeliver the parcel" slip while pushing letters and bills and magazines past it.)

Monday, the slip was torn and bits were missing but there was enough to make out what it was. (Breno brought it in when he came home for lunch, not realizing what it was at first.) So I sandwiched the pieces between layers of cellophane tape and attached it to a piece of stiff paper on which I wrote a note explaining that I'd left the slip there before the rain started and it had been ignored when Saturday's mail was delivered. I was careful not to make personal accusations because I didn't know whether the lazy clown was delivering mail yesterday, or one of the carriers who actually does their job. Alas, Monday's mail arrived while I was taping the slip back together, but fortunately the mail truck was still in sight. So I stuck the note to the outside of the windshielt, facing in, in front of the driver's seat, so that it could not possibly be ignored even intentionally. And I made a point to be up and ready to answer the doorbell today.

(Interestingly, more mail arrived late yesterday, hours after the first delivery. I suspect, but do not know, that a neighbour found mis-delivered mail in his mailbox and ran it over to my mail slot in the evening. The amount of mis-delivered mail that shows up here is orders of magnitude above the USPS' national average, even once you filter out the mis-sorted mail that some facility upstream of our local office has routed to the wrong zip code.)

A few minute ago I looked downstairs and saw that mail had come, though there'd been no doorbell yet. I thought that perhaps the carrierhad decided to deliver everyone's envelopes and magazines at once without carrying any parcels, then make a second trip just to houses that were getting parcels -- I've seen 'em do that sometimes.

As it turned out, the parcel was sitting just outside my front door, on my top step, where I would not have been able to see it through the door if I hadn't leaned forward a bit while picking up the flat mail from the floor. No doorbell, just dropped the package right there.

In this neighbourhood.

I've lived in places -- suburbs -- where that was a reasonable way to deliver a package that didn't require a signature. Where a parcel so placed would not be obvious to every passerby on the street, and where the general tenor of the neighbourhood was such that petty theft of parcels by someone who did happen to spot them seemed unlikely.

But this is the city. Any pedestrian walking on my side of Lombard Street -- and we get a non-trivial amount of pedestrian traffic -- has to pass within two paces of my door, and is likely to pass within arm's reach of where the package was. Where any driver who happens to glance sideways has a clear vies of my front steps. Not a place where I think leaving a package in th open without even ringing the bell to alert me that I should come take it inside seems even the least bit reasonable. Hey, if the letter carrier is in a hurry and doesn't want to stick around, I can deal with a sixty second window of vulnerability between their ringing my bell and my reaching the front door, but whichever carrier delivered my mail today was too lazy to even ascend five steps (actually, they could probably reach the button from the fourth steps) to ring the bell.

The USPS as a whole has a remarkable record. Some individual post offices, on the other hand, are truly abysmal. 21223, despite the presence of two or three competent employees, is one of them. (And the local postmaster is completely dismissive of customer complaints.) I'm also not terribly impressed with the sorting facility downtown, which keeps putting 21223 bar codes on stuff addressed to E. Lombard St, so they wind up being sent to W. Lombard St. I've no idea how much of my own mail has gotten delivered to the other side of town.

And then there's the problem of misdelivered mail that I write a correction on and instructions to please redeliver to the correct address, or return to sender (depending on the nature of the error), getting re-delivered to my house three or four times, even after I've blacked out the bar code to avoid having an automatic sorting machine just drop it back in a bundle aimed here. Systemic problem, or local? Well I don't get them back so often if I drop them off in some other zip code instead of nearby...

Completely unrelated, but as long as I'm posting at all I should probably reassure folks inclined to worry about me: today I'm doing much better than yesterday or the day before. Not exactly well, since I'm functioning only with the assistance of painkillers, but today the painkillers work well enough to enable me to walk down the stairs instead of lurching forward one or two steps at a time grunting and grimacing and trying to steel myself for the next step. Yesterday the pain was more than the drugs were able to compensate for. (A good day is one when just my regular morning & evening doses of ibuprofen + Ultram are enough to allow me to function reasonably. I still entertain some hope of experiencing one of those later this week.)