Oh No They Didn't (Post Office Edition)

I wasn't going to tell this story here, as it's kind of silly how annoyed it made me on Wednesday, and then it was all working out, but then it went one step further into crazytown, and now here I am, telling the story.

I'm sure I have mentioned in the past that I sometimes get frustrated with mail delivery to this building. While I get that it's an odd building in mail-delivery terms (a total of five doors on three sides of the building, and the mailboxes are inside one of those entrances, which you can't tell from outside), none of the setup is new*, and far more often than seems reasonable to me, I either don't get any mail, or get mail late**. (After this week, I have added "will not have to deal with the post office not knowing where to deliver the mail" to my list of things I will appreciate about moving.)
*The building is from 1745, but it was moved to this location in 1875. I can't swear that the mailboxes have been where they are since then, but I do know they have been there since I first saw the building, 11+ years ago.
**I don't expect real mail that often, but I get enough catalogs/bills/charity requests to expect something most days, plus I get the local weekly newspaper, which is delivered by mail on Thursdays. Except when it comes on Friday. Or sometimes Saturday.

By the way, while I'm complaining, very frequently when the mail is correctly delivered, the carrier does not close the door, the one that they just opened to come in. Now, there's a storm door on that side, so they're not leaving us open to the elements, but I hate to think of the amount of heat (or air conditioning, in summer) that gets out, even with the storm door.

So, as it happened, I had two items this week that I had ordered that were supposed to be delivered on Wednesday through the USPS. One ended up getting pushed out to Thursday, but the other one was through Amazon, and when I checked the tracking on Wednesday afternoon, having looked and seen that no mail had yet come, the Amazon tracking said that there had been a problem, that the carrier could not access the building. Great, I thought, the carrier went to the wrong door, it was locked, and they gave up. I groused about it on Facebook and Twitter, as one does, but wasn't really surprised.

Let me say now that I am fully aware that none of this is the fault of the individual carrier(s). Since we don't have a regular carrier who would be familiar with the route, I do not understand why the USPS does not have a process in place to tell carriers what the weird things on this (or any other) route are. I mean, this can't be the only building in the US that has something unconventional about it, right? What follows may sound like I'm blaming the carrier, since they're on the front line and it's easy to get annoyed with them, so I wanted to state upfront that I know, they aren't at fault.

While understanding how this happened, I was frustrated that it happened, and wanted to make sure that the same thing did not happen again on Thursday. So Thursday morning, I taped this little sign up outside the door I mainly use, which is one of the locked ones.

Fairly polite, right? Please and thanks, no "Hey, dumbass," just trying to help.

On Thursday, of course, I was watching for the mail truck. At one point, I saw that the truck had parked near the building, and went down to the boxes, but no mail yet. A while later, I checked the online tracking of one of the packages, and it said delivered! Yay! For some reason, though, I glanced out my window at the doorstep, on the side where I had left the note, and to my surprise and dismay, could see that a bunch of items had been dropped there, outside that door.

• Which is good, in that I got my mail! Including the red yarn I was waiting for!
• But bad, in that it was left outside, to potentially blow away, get wet, get taken, all that stuff.

So I went down to get it, and seeing my note there, and being annoyed, I took it and walked over to where the truck was still parked. The carrier wasn't in it, but I stuck the note to the window and then went inside. To me, this was a way of saying, "I said, please deliver to the mailboxes," and honestly I figured the carrier would crumple it up and drop it in the snow next to the truck. But later I saw the truck was gone, with no apparent note left behind, and then after that, I looked down at the steps again, and saw that the carrier had taped the note back where it originally was.

I both laughed and was annoyed. Was this cluelessness, or was the carrier telling me, "Fuck you, you can't tell me how to do my job"? But I didn't actually look at that note until this morning, when I was taking a bag of trash out, and thought I might as well take the note down. Only after I was back inside did I see that the carrier left me a message.

Don't you love that? "No mail box no mail," and underlining the "Thanks" back at me. As if I am just pretending that we have mailboxes, and you, Thursday's carrier, are the first person in the building's history to discover that this building has no mailboxes, and has been trying to cheat the Postal Service into delivering mail anyway.

Plus, it implies that the carrier went around to that side of the building to look for mailboxes, but didn't try to open the door on that side.

Sigh. I decided that, although who knows if today's carrier would be the same as yesterday's (who in turn may or may not have been the same as Wednesday's), I might as well reply, and did so.

"The mail boxes are inside. They have been there for years."

The mail was delivered to the boxes today. I don't take credit for it, though, as the truck was parked down the block instead, which makes me think it wasn't the same carrier. And in fact, I didn't get any specific mail, just the weekly pile of grocery ads. So who knows.

Meanwhile, I took the note down.

In better news, I love what the red yarn is adding to the blanket.

So at least that's something.

And, someone came and took the table I was looking to rehome, which I had about given up on, so that's a good thing!

And it's a long weekend, which is another good thing! Hooray for Monday off.