That was the cheerful greeting from the postal worker who opened the doors at the Stadium branch post office this morning. I had packed up a big box of stuff to send to Callyforny, cause I’m just a moom who mails stuff to California, don’tcha know. I like packing up boxes of stuff to send to my kids wherever they are. I definitely have more fun packing boxes up for other people than unpacking them. And I am getting to be an expert with bubble-wrap and packing tape and all that fun stuff. Back in the day, I loved when somebody at college would call me in the middle of the day, “Moom, can you send me such-and-such?”. A mission! I would immediately interrupt my schoolwork or whatever I was doing and search out whatever it was they needed and pack it up. Extra fun if I had to go out and buy something and bonus points if I had to run out to Staples to get mailing supplies. Oot and aboot. Anything to get my face up out of my computer for a while. Anything to be useful to my grown-up children.

All right, let’s not get all maudlin here, KW. Nowadays I still like to pack up boxes but getting them to the post office isn’t all that easy because my loverly work cubicle is out in the backwater of a beautiful business park that is nowhere near anything on earth. If I have something small enough that I can drop it into the box by one of the post office uscans, fine, I can do it on the way to work. If it’s a big enough box that it won’t fit in that drop box, I have to go inside and play post office line roulette. Don’t get me wrong. All of the Stadium post office employees that I have ever encountered are wonderful. Well, except for “Al” back in the bulk mail unit but I think my days of non-profit bulk mailings are over so he can harass somebody else about using the wrong blasted rubber bands. But I just digressed. The problem with the regular customer service line is that you never know who is ahead of you. If everybody has a straightforward errand there, it goes fast. We won’t talk about those other days except to say thank god for the iPhone.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I packed up a box to send to the left coast and I finally got around to mailing it today because I thought it was too big for the uscan box and I didn’t wanna wait in line on the way to work. Today, I rather randomly drove over the post office and arrived a couple minutes before 10 o’clock. Miraculously, the place opens at 10 on Saturdays! (It changes all the time so I didn’t know.) Not so miraculously, I was last (probably eighth) in the line of people that had queued up outside the still-locked door. Some of those people had some serious-looking stuff to mail, like the woman with a big dolly with four big boxes on it.

Just as I joined the queue, the above-mentioned postal worker opened the doors with his cheerful greeting. He also tried to encourage everyone who entered the door to use one of the two uscans. Most people brushed that off but I (last in line) said, “I’d love to use the uscan but I think my box is too big.” “Oh, no it’s not!” he replied. And so we went and measured my box against the drop box and, lo and behold, it fit with room to spare! I think they must’ve changed the drop box or something because I was sure it wouldn’t fit. He asked me if I needed help with the uscan and y’all know I didn’t because I love to beat up on computers et al.

The whole thing took me two minutes and he really *was* cheerful and I walked out of there with a smile on my face and that was wonderful customer service from somebody who probably doesn’t get paid a whole heck of a lot (but who knows who he really was). That was after I had read dooce.com’s post about her new and defective Maytag washing machine. It had my blood boiling a bit although it had a happy ending of sorts. But why do we have to resort to Twittering by popular bloggers to change how customer service/support is handled? Why can’t the corporate slugs figure it out without being hit on the head. Anyway, the Planet Ann Arbor Stadium post office has some wonderful folks working and I certainly encountered one of them today. I hope they’re being paid well and treated right. G’night.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 7:32 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.