We recently had a grand misadventure with the postal service, Canada Post. Now, on the surface, Canada Post is friendly with its lollipop-proffering clerks and splashy with its vibrant, multicolored postal boxes conveniently located all around town (none of which seem to be photographed and posted online so I can show you just how cheerful they look); whereas, one can barely find a USPS blue box any more. Well, I am here to tell you, it is all a magnificent distraction. The truth is, it is crap shoot up here. I blame the lack of Saturday delivery. (Gasp!) Our mail was missing for more than seven weeks, and no one could tell us why...until I finally traipsed into the post office (for the third time on this specific quest) and found a smiling, lollipop-proffering employee who happened to notice that mail for our household was now being held at the post office because our box was too full of mail to deliver any more. This, after other encounters had resulted in people telling me to be patient and that there was no mail anywhere for us. Finally, there was mail for us. They were right; we just needed to be patient and persistent. ARGH!
Our box. Box 4 on Summerland Drive, panel 2? No, that's not your box any more. Wait. What?
A prior call to the oh-so-helpful customer service line had revealed
that our postal code had been changed. Without notice to us, of
course. No worries, though. We later learned that they remembered to tell Entertainment Weekly back in July sometime. Bully for them. We had asked if that meant a change to our box, as well, but no one else made that connection. Where was all of our mail? We were still getting coupons addressed to no one in particular. Service hadn't been suspended all together. What gives?
On that day the mail would prevail, a postal supervisor came out and handed me new keys to our new box on a new street. I tried not to be concerned that the key envelope had a completely wrong address on it. I just took them and hoped for the best. He apologized, but he could not say what exactly happened. He admitted he had overheard questions about my mail in the prior weeks, but he did not intervene earlier. Dude.
The keys fit, once I drove around to two different possible postal bays and found the correct box. They "weren't exactly sure" which one it would be. ???
We were rewarded with many greetings for Christopher's birthday in August and Eliana's in September, two High Five magazines, seven Entertainment Weeklys, all of Eliana's school paperwork and bus pass information, labels I had ordered for Eliana's school things and had given up on seeing, and some bills that luckily are paid online. It was like Christmas. Very strange, frustrating Christmas.
I want to congratulate Canada Post on one success that they did have, lest I seem ungracious as a visitor to this great country. My mother-in-law addressed a card to Eliana without a street name on it at all, with just the number two and our city name. It arrived, a mere month after she sent it, and one week after we unlocked the mystery of the moving mailbox. We must be famous around the post office now. Go ahead, write us a letter. Your real Christmas cards should arrive if you mail them now, even if they change our box again.
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