Adventures in Real Life - Electronic and Postal

Wednesday was my regular day off and I was sitting at my desk, pastels all around me, my sketchpad with inked drawings awaiting color in front of me and Aearwen on my cell phone for our weekly conversation. But we kept getting interrupted - on her end first, and then twice on mine. Since she was leaving to visit her brother the next day we finally smiled, said we would catch up next week, and hung up. Within five minutes my shop was on the phone with me again. They were saying something about the register computer crashing - they heard a bunch of small, high-pitched beeps which were followed by a complete and sudden shut down. I was on my way to the shop when they phoned me again, telling me that they got it fixed.

Nothing like a computer melt-down to brighten my day - NOT!

Yesterday afternoon I was at the register when the same thing happened. A series of small, high-pitched beeps followed by a complete, sudden shut-down. I isolated it to the APU - the automatic power unit - and went to the backroom where I unplugged everything that I had attached to the back room computers - the scanner, the laptop, my lamp and my recharging cords. After some difficulty I got the back APU moved out of its shelving and replaced the defective one with that one - one that I knew worked well and had a new battery in it. Everything powered up and worked a charm. What a relief. I have an extra APU at home that I will bring to the shop to swap out so that I can have my backroom equipment back again. Minor crises averted again... What was the saying over the summer? Stay Calm? That worked - very well *grin*.

So that was one success...and then we have the US Postal Service. Now I have known some outstanding postal service employees in the past - some sharp and fun people with wicked-good senses of humor. But whoever is on my home route needs a bit more ability to pay attention to detail. On Wednesday I received a card hand-addressed to a person who shares my street number (12345) but not my street name (AaBb instead of GgHh). I wrote "Delivered to Wrong Address" on the envelope and dropped it into the mail on my way to work in the morning. Last night, it was back in my mailbox - AGAIN. I have now added a circle around the street name, the word TWICE! underlined next to "Delivered to Wrong Address", and highlighted the word TWICE. I'll drop it into the mail again on the way to work and we'll see if it comes to me yet again. In the meanwhile my DH has been expecting something in the mail since Wednesday and it hasn't arrived yet.

Hand sorting - how 1950's. No wonder the Postal Service is
losing money hands over fist.

Competence? The US Postal Service has some of the best and some of the worst employees I've ever met. Oh! One more example of stupidity, although this time it is the system, not people. I was sending something to a customer via a postage-paid return envelope and mentioned to my postal carrier as he collected the envelope that they had to receive the paperwork before mid-week (it was only going across town). He said that because it was a postage-paid return envelope that it could be delayed for up to a week because of the way they need to keep their records on them - hand entering them into a ledger before delivering them. He also suggested that if I wanted it delivered quickly, to just put a postage stamp onto the envelope instead of the postage-paid aspect of the envelope and then it would be treated as first-class mail and they would receive it early in the week. I put on a stamp. Such a system!