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Chewy postal goodness

Of late the post office seems to have been getting my mail to my house. We've had the same carrier for the past few months and he has demonstrated his excellent capacity for reading street names. Since the problems from the beginning of the year have been solved (for now), I can once again order used books online and have some confidence that they'll make it to my house. I still wonder what happened to that book on the seventeenth-century British civil service …

But the post office is doing their best to keep me from developing a false sense of security.

Back in April, I got an email from a client about an invoice I sent through the mail which was so damaged that she could neither read it nor reconstruct it. I sent in another copy of the invoice and forgot about it.

Till yesterday, when I received the other half of it from the Undeliverable Mail Office. My business envelope had been torn lengthwise, right down the center. My client must have received the half with the mailing address in April, and I received the half with the return address and the stamp. The post office kindly included a postage paid envelope with their "oops" note, dated 16 August.

Four months? The Undeliverable Mail Office, which is at the central post office maybe a ten minute drive from my house so it's not like my half envelope has been wending its way around the country because the stamp wasn't even cancelled so it must have been torn right there at the central post office, has a four month backup of undeliverable mail?

I wonder what else they've got lurking around in Undeliverables. Maybe they've got my history book.