Friday, March 10, 2006

The Post Office Strikes Again

If you are a faithful reader of my blog, you know my disdain and horrible experiences with the US Postal Service. Well, the fun continues...but, to get you up to speed, I must start the saga from a year and a half ago.

I came home and retrieved my mail, only to discover a slip indicating they attempted to deliver a registered letter but I was not at home. Shocker, the rest of the world is working when you are too, Mr. Mailman. Due to the nature of how this letter was sent, I was required to go pick it up at the post office personally or sign off for someone else to pick it up in my place. At the time, the job I had wasn't very flexible in my lunch hour, and considering the post office was near my home, not my place of employment, I was in a quandry. Thankfully, my boss agreed, under duress, to pick up the letter for me. He's the skeptical kind who assumed he'd contract an Anthrax poisoning by doing this for me.

When he returned to the office, I discovered the letter was from Romania or some such other European location and the contents were in some foreign lanuage I couldn't identify. I first took some of the content and plugged it into Babelfish to translate it, but because it wasn't a pure language (probably a dialect of a couple of languages), it didn't translate well. I decided to take it to my church where I have a myriad of folks who speak, or can read, multiple languages. Taking their expertise and the Babelfish results, we determined it was a summons to appear in court March 2005 for some man who had assaulted someone. Great. What I deducted was that my full name wasn't used, just my first initial and last name, and apparently they did a Google search or some internet search to find a US address for this unknown person to appear in court. Since I couldn't determine a return address, nor an international phone number, I tossed it aside figuring they had the wrong person.

A couple of weeks ago, I visited my mailbox when I arrived home like I always do and lo and behold, another slip indicating I'd missed a delivery of a registered letter again. I was highly suspicious given the "To" address was the same naming as my previous Romanian debacle. I decided this time to take action. I called the post office and explained my story from the previous year and my hesistation to accept the letter if it was from the same place because of their assumption that I was the person they were seeking. The Postal Representative retrieved the letter and confirmed it was from an international source. So, I declined the letter and they mailed it back as a refusal. And, she assured me if it happened again, we'd get the US Postal Inspector involved. Now, my postal experiences could be elevated to the real federal level. Lovely.

You know, it's stories like these that remind me why I have a blog. I think I lead the quirkiest life in my world.

2 comments:

Dana said...

That is bizarre! Let us know what happens.

RosieBoo said...

So far, so good. No more word. Let's hope my refusal has ended the madness!