Going Postal, or The Next Lesson

 

My wife and I are moving from New Orleans, where we’ve lived for the last several years, to Salem, Oregon where our youngest son and his wife live. The very last stop we made on our way to the I-10 West on-ramp was to our USPS branch. I felt a little weird doing it, but I wanted answers.  Did I get them?  Here’s the story.

Even before the pandemic, something was not quite right with our mail delivery.  We would go a few days with no mail, and then perhaps a week.  We’d get some magazines all at once, sometimes 2 issues of Time (different weeks) delivered on the same day!

Scottie our condo mate found out that Bennie our mail carrier had retired, and substitutes were filling in until he could be replaced. OK,  I could live with that for awhile.  But then, we went 10 days without mail. I couldn’t just keep waiting, so I biked on over to USPS Bywater which is our collection and distribution branch to find out what gives. The Bywater Branch is a dark and somewhat dismal place and invariably no matter how long the line is there is only one postal worker at a window (there are three windows) and one or two other workers walking around in the back, appearing and disappearing. Their explanation for our missing mail had me doing repeated forehead smashes with the heel of my hand, but I’ll get to that.  

My wife Carol and I did leave New Orleans that day and now we’re on our way to Salem, Oregon. As anyone who has moved out of a home knows, this is an interesting experience!  And yet, a significant chunk of my emotional energy has been focused, despite the rigors and needs of the packing and all, on the USPS problem.  I tell this story in the hope that by doing so I can more fully appreciate what I might glean from it, and perhaps become a better person as a result.  I am always open to improvements believe me.

I’m doing some pretty intense psychotherapy but I’m on hiatus now in order to accomplish the move and scheduling Zoom therapy sessions is not possible at least for a couple weeks.  I am not too sure how this USPS experience fits into my “dark turn of mind” but I’m sure it does, and I'll end this report with some insight.  My motivation for writing has something to do with writing as therapy, where there is some hope that I’ll be able to sort things out and maybe even gain some wisdom in the process. At the same time, I hope you find this report entertaining.

My son Jon is an adventurer, a low-tech aficionado, a musician, a handyman, a social and environmental justice activist, and will soon be working in the digital information field (when COVID sabotaged his career as a New Orleans musician, he enrolled in a Computer Science program).  But for this story, I focus on his low-tech environmental justice adventuristic qualities. Specifically, he sought out and obtained information on how to most creatively and efficiently experience the joy of bicycling.  Toward that end, he utilized a guidebook on how to think about the qualities of the bicycle and how such educated thinking could be applied to the art of cycling, including quite practically what to look for when buying a bike. Since I was familiar with the publisher of the book having read several issues of the magazine Bicycle Quarterly, I wanted to get a copy. 

Amazon had it for $42, but if you ordered directly from ReneHerse Cycles in Seattle, it was $32!  So in went my order, and since I had about 2 weeks before leaving town, I thought it possible to get it in time for reading on our journey back to the Pacific Northwest. Just after ordering, I was asked by USPS if I wanted to sign up for parcel tracking, and I opted in.  I got several messages about where it was as it got closer, it was all quite exciting as it appeared certain that it’d arrive in time.  At 6:43 am on April 3 a text came in that the book was out for delivery from the NOLA office.  Yay!! I would be home that day and likely to receive the book, reducing the admittedly low chance of someone wanting to steal the package  from the front porch of our condo building, if the door to our breezeway where the mailboxes are located was locked. You might find this odd, since of course by now (it had been 6 months since our route carrier Bennie retired) USPS would have hired a new letter carrier for our route, and they would have a key.  But no, there was no replacement carrier yet.  At 1:24 pm I got this text from USPS: “Forwarded”.  That was it, no explanation and the texts stopped.  I entered my tracking number on the USPS web site and learned that “forwarded” might mean a wrong address, mixed up zip code, or something like that.  We had turned in our change of address forms, but we had indicated the start date for forwarding to be 4 days later, April 7, so that couldn’t be it, could it? 

Being busy with packing and saying goodbye, I left it there and stewed.  I was amazed at how this small thing was consuming so much of my rumination and daydream content capacity. Finally, after everything was packed or given away, I decided to swing by the Bywater USPS and suffer the line to ask a real person.

As I mentioned previously, I had made a similar visit to check on our mail drought. At that earlier visit, I stepped to the counter after my 20 minute wait in line, and told the postal worker that me and the other 3 condo dwellers were not getting our mail.  She said something like “oh, yeah, I know about that” and disappeared into the back.  6.5 minutes later (or close, it seemed like a really long time. I was getting nervous that the people behind me in line were going to get on my case),  she returned with the supervisor, who explained that what was happening was that Bennie’s route was still being subbed by other carriers who had their own routes!  They would complete their usual routes and then if they had time and it wasn’t too dark or whatever, they would deliver some of Bennie’s customers mail!  Really. that was the plan.  And yes, they would be hiring a new mail carrier soon and the problem would be resolved!  As I said, it's now 6 months later and still there is no regular carrier. 

So here I am in line again, our last stop on our way out of town, hoping to get the book to enjoy on our journey to Salem, and it’s just got to be here. This time, the wait is shorter, with only one of the customers in line having to make several calls to get the address right on the package they were mailing, I related my story about the tracking and the forwarded message.  She said “give me the tracking number”.  I did (it’s a gazillion digits).  She may have said what’s my name and date of birth, or maybe that was the receptionist at the optometrist office the week before, but after she punched it in, she said “that’s been forwarded to your new address”.  Not much to say to that, I was disappointed but at least knew where it was, or was on the way to.  I sure could have used the tracking feature, just for peace of mind, but apparently once your stuff gets forwarded, no one really knows where it is. (What if this had been an important document or something worth more than $32 and easily replaced?  I shudder to think…).

So I’m ready for adventure now, heading West on I-10, truly amazed at how captivated I was by this saga of mail-ordering.  I can’t wait to get back into therapy and get some help with this.  Really though, it’s more humorous than troubling.  But wait, a buzzing in my pocket and a characteristic sound, a phone call!  It’s USPS, what  could they want?  “Hello Mr. Robert, I have your package here and it’ll be out for delivery (in New Orleans) tomorrow!”  

Now here’s where I am going to need help from my therapist.  What I wish I would have said, dramatically and with joy, is “Wow, thanks for calling, I am so happy to know where my book is!  Please make sure you forward it to my new address, you have that, don’t you?”  And then I would have confirmed it and he would have felt good and I would have put a The End on this story.  But instead, I related what had happened, my frustration and unhappiness with the trip to the Bywater (Why didn’t the postal worker at the window know it was still there and hadn’t been “forwarded” yet?! Grrr!).  He apologized, I was too off-balance with emotion to check to make sure the forwarding address was correct.  True, the USPS has some major problems, but that phone call could have been a chance for two humans to enjoy a shared experience of the joy of  problem solving, of finding what is looked for, of solving at least some of life’s mysteries.  Instead, I felt worse, and he had to suffer the complaints of another disgruntled customer.  I really felt sad about that missed opportunity.  I know I miss others.  I love it when I don’t, and hopefully this story can be an inspiration to you, to lean towards opportunities for creating joy. That’s what’s so valuable.   I’ll eventually enjoy the book, but I regret not celebrating when that postal worker called to tell me he was holding it in his hands.  It was a moment for experiencing what the Buddhists call sympathetic joy, where you feel the joy of others and celebrate it.  I let it slip through my fingers. But life is for learning and I am grateful for this lesson, a special delivery from the USPS.

Carol and the loading specialists, the day before our trip to the post office. 
. Everything we're bringing from New Orleans to Salem is in those two boxes.