Oh, I don’t really mean that… Just that I’m getting sick and tired of having to jump through hoops to get mundane little paperwork type things done. For example… I mailed an important document to FV two weeks ago. TWO WEEKS (!). I mailed it to the address I always use to mail things to FV and I wrote FV big as life on the first line of the address. Yesterday (!), the envelope got returned to me as undeliverable. Okay. Excuse me? What? Turns out that they have changed their address “a little”. What? Okay. Whatever. What I have a problem with is why on EARTH couldn’t the Sault Ste. Siberian post office deliver the damn thing ANYWAY!!! Siberia is a small town and FV is a *very* well-known building. I suppose there may be a few residents somewhere in Sault Ste. Siberia that don’t know what FV is but I HIGHLY doubt that the postal carriers don’t know about it.

What is going on here? Back in the Jurassic Age, I can remember Radical Betty getting a letter addressed to something like, “the house on the beach down the hill on the gravel road.” RB lived in a ski chalet on the beach but had her mail delivered to a post office box in Sault Ste. Siberia. She *got* that letter. Somebody at the post office was intelligent enough to connect the name with a PO box and CARED enough to put it in the box and not return it as undeliverable.

So what is going on? Has the postal service gotten so pickety-pickety with stupid little rules that just because someone has not addressed something 100% correctly that they have to return the letter even when they know DAMN WELL that FV is that log building that they have been delivering mail to for the last umpteen years? *Especially* when the address has *recently* changed (slightly)? Recently enough that maybe not everyone knows about the change? Can’t they automatically “forward” mail to the correct address for a while? No wonder people prefer to use on-line communications (not that email, etc., is perfect either).

Sorry, but I spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on this situation today. Not to mention a much more complicated one that I won’t blahg about except to say that it involved multiple phone calls (!) and caused me to have to trade my lunchtime walk for a mad dash *home* (!) A charade of confidentiality. All because I was trying to PAY A BILL!!!! DO YOU FOLKS WANT YOUR MONEY OR NOT!???!

To the first situation, we need to ratchet back the “rules” a little bit and let our postal workers use fuzzy logic when delivering mail. Unless my letter just happened to get picked up by an incompetent imbecile. There are those in every profession. But this caused lost time, income, and productivity for multiple people and entities. And as to the second situation? Confidentiality of personal records is important but we need to be able to bend those rules a bit too if need be. We are strangling ourselves with this crap!

Color me frustrated! Good night!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2011 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.