an interesting apology

I don’t think I will ever forgive the US postal service for their disgraceful service back in 2002. We had just moved into our new house and the adjacent house was empty. The lady who had lived there died and her daughter would visit the house about once every month or two to check on things and collect the mail. The way the postal route worked, they would deliver to the vacant house just before our house. The mail would go into a slot in their front door.

It was the spring of that year, a time when high school graduates all over the country rush home each day to check the mail to see if they have been accepted to the college of their dreams. In our case, the mail was not being delivered to our house... the US postal service couldn’t figure out how to SKIP A HOUSE if it was not receiving any mail that day. They would repeatedly deliver our mail to the vacant house. Maybe... or maybe not... they would realize that they had screwed up... we would sometimes get the mail from the other next-door neighbor. I assume all of the people along our street were playing ‘musical mail.’ In our case, we couldn’t get any of our misdelivered mail until the daughter of the dead lady showed up to check on things. Bills became overdue... we missed events... you get the picture... and... we didn’t hear from the colleges. The worst part about all of this is that repeated calls to the postal service were met with unbelievable indifference.

So.. being on this side of the pond, you might think that things would be different. Well, they kinda are and they kinda aren’t. When we ordered stamps for our Christmas cards, they were supposed to deliver them to us, just like regular mail, but in reality we just got a notice in our box asking us to go stand in line with the hoards of other people to pick up the stamps at the post office. So we obediently did that. But then we needed more stamps one day. Paul ordered them on line to ‘do an experiment’. He believed that if we ordered half-sheets, then they might decide to put them in a small envelope and then they would put them in our box.

In late December he placed the order. In mid-January, we had received no stamps. Then we began to question... did we really place the order? Did we forget to do something? Did we not understand the French? ... not knowing... we placed the order again. Yesterday we received an apology letter from the french postal service– personally addressed and hand signed – telling us that they are sorry, they screwed up. It was a very polite letter – the French are masters at politeness – they explained that the problem was that the stamps had been sent to a post office in a neighboring city! The letter begged us to accept this excuse! Wow... would the US postal service ever send you a personal letter to apologize for poor service? ... I’m still waiting for that letter from the service in 2002.

But ... now we don’t know how to cancel all the other French stamps we ordered.