Most Expensive US Postal Service in the Country…

Grrrrrrr! Our moronic City Parents and our clueless USPS mail carriers just cost me $75, plus $16 and change, plus about $20 I could’ve made selling the two books forked over to my demented neighbor.

For reasons unknown to anyone, the name of the road I live on was changed from the name the developer put on the plat map (let’s call it Nirvana Street) to Shangri-La Lane. As it happens, the road directly to the north is called Shangri-La Drive. The house numbers are the same.

As you can imagine, the opportunities for confusion are legion. 😀 At this time of year in particular, the Post Office employees get confused. They deliver mail addressed to Shangri-La Lane over to Shangri-La Drive, and vice versa. All the time.

The guy who lives on Shangri-La Drive in the house whose number corresponds to mine is a nice enough man who has been very ill for some years. Not all of the poor guy’s marbles are intact.

This is the gentleman who intercepted six months’ worth of credit-card statements from Macy’s, all addressed to me as plain as day, and threw them in the trash. I’d opened the account to get a dollar or two off of an already discounted little handbag, charged up all of about ten bucks, and forgot about it. Because I use my AMEX card for everything, I never thought about it again…until Macy’s sicced a collection agency on me.

So as you can imagine, I was not pleased. And even though I occasionally remind the postal carriers to try to get it right, the part-timers they hire at this time of year always get it wrong.

Along about the end of last month, I ordered two copies of a book Camptown Races has on the drawing board, so I could take them to display at the WVWW shindig last Saturday. These never showed up. Ordered one more and asked the printer to put a rush on it; got the thing just in time.

But now, two weeks later, the original order has never shown up. That’s 16 bucks down the drain, plus of course I didn’t have those to take with me to the chivaree. Since the one I did have sold instantly, it’s entirely possible that I could have sold the other two there; hence, we have a potential $36 down the drain.

The printer disgorged the post office’s tracking report, which showed they delivered it on December 2.

Yeah. I’ll bet they did: to Shangri-La Drive, not Lane.

So yesterday I walked over to the neighbors’ house and inquired as to whether the residents had seen my package. Mrs. Batshittsky answered the door — she really is a very sweet (and very beleaguered) lady — and said no, they hadn’t seen it. Eventually poor old Batshittsky himself came shuffling up the hall and stood there, cowering behind the Mrs.

He looked very sick — and kind of wild-eyed. I felt terrible for her. She has an awful lot to have to cope with…what a load to bear! Anyway, he clearly wasn’t competent to say what he’d seen or hadn’t seen, but I figured he’d probably relieved the post box of its mail while she was out running errands, so she had no idea what he could’ve thrown out.

So. No help there.

This morning I took the P.O.’s tracking report up the the Post Office. A full hour later… Yes. It took an hour of driving and standing in line and then standing at the counter waiting on a hapless and enormously overworked CSR to get an answer to the question of “where did you deliver this thing?”

At first, the CSR I reached after a half-hour wait in line said they could actually pinpoint the specific building where the carrier delivers a package. She then took the sheet of paper with the zillion-digit tracking number into the back of the building. It was a good twenty minutes before she resurfaced.

Well. No. They didn’t have a GPS doodad running on the day this was delivered. All she could tell me was that the carrier placed it in a mailbox.

Right. The Batshittsky mailbox. Not the Funny Farm mailbox.

I asked how much it would cost to rent a mailbox there. It’s very cheap — only about twenty bucks a year. I’d have to go to the back of the line to do that, though, because I’d need to be attended by one of the employees who could keyboard in the charges.

Uh huh. The line extended almost back to the door.

To pick up my mail from this illustrious institution, I would have to cross the new train tracks (where the signal will be red until sometime after the cows come home), make my way through a freight-train-length school zone, pass through an increasingly dangerous slum, and get out of my car in an area where I normally keep the car doors locked. And…really…do I want to put up with USPS customer service unto the end of time?

Possibly not.

So it was over to the mailbox place and kitsch store in the equally dangerous Albertson’s shopping center down at the corner of Main Drag South and Conduit of Blight. There I rented a box from an exceptionally eccentric shopkeeper: $75 for six months.

That’s effing outrageous, of course. But…it’s right down the street — a three-minute drive. I can park directly in front, just two steps from the entrance, and the owners always keep their dogs tied outside next to the door. While I was there, one of them tried to remove a foot from a bum who walked by, so I figure that’s a good sign. Uh, I guess.

So to the $16 for the lost books we can add $75 for a mailbox to receive stuff I’d like to have NOT go to the Batshittsky Manse, for a total of $91 that this stupid little event has cost me. Add another $20 in missed opportunity to sell the absent books, and we’re over a hundred bucks.

{sigh}

Wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to prove the package went where I believe it went? Then I could have told Mrs. B to keep her honored husband away from the mailbox — maybe she could rent a box and keep the key out of his reach? And I could have asked her to pay to replace the discarded books. And maybe she could pay the $75 I’m having to spend to keep her DH out of my mail.

There are a million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them…