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Dear NBC: Please don't make me look like a dork
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The great pay debate rages on
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It could be much worse
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For those of you who maybe aren’t aware, last year I got married and moved from the Boston area to the Atlanta area. The backstory is long and complicated (no, I did not mail-order myself a nice southern man; I simply ended up marrying one of my oldest friends), but when it came down to planning our lives together, the move was a no-brainer.
He works at a university. I work at my laptop. I was free to move because I can work wherever I am, whereas he’s rather attached to his students and colleagues and seems to think he needs to be here. Okay. I moved, and was glad to be able to do so more or less without a hitch where my career was concerned.
And the fact of the matter is that I really love it here; there’s no love lost between me and the northeast weather, and I grew up in a university town and have loved returning to one. I have no complaints about my new home. (And that’s aside from the fact that my new home comes with a new husband. Bonus!)
Recently I’ve come to realize something, though. Something that affects my business, and something which I’ve been loathe to voice, lest the locals think I’m being a snippy yankee, or something. So I’m going to say this as gently as I possibly can.
Um… I don’t think folks around here take mail delivery very seriously.
It could be a southern thing (unlikely), or it could be a small town thing (more likely), or it could just be our particular mail carrier (dingdingding!), but suddenly my business is being affected by my new locale—because people are sending me things that I’m not receiving. Or that I’m not receiving in a very timely manner.
True, most of my work is online, and most of my dealings are via email or telephone. But I write for two sites where I often need to receive items for review or giveaway, and things have been just not showing up.
Most of my clients use UPS or FedEx, but occasionally you just want to send something through the good ol’ fashioned US Mail, you know? And you can call me crazy, but I always thought that USPS was not, you know, delivery-optional.
Yesterday I got something which had been the subject of a 20-message long email string, as the sender and I had—over the course of a week—tried to figure out where it had gone. A postmark on the face of the envelope claimed it had left Boston on March 11th. A postmark on the backside of the envelope said it had reached northern Georgia on March 22nd. Hey, it should take eleven days for an envelope to get from Boston to Georgia… if sent by bike messenger. What the heck? And then it took four days to get processed from there to my town?
While this is an extreme example, it’s not the first time I’ve had such an experience with the mail here. And thus I’ve discovered one of the unexpected drawbacks of the home office.
Maybe I should’ve tipped the letter carrier at Christmas…?
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under Head hitting brick wall.
Tags: home office, snail mail, USPS
March 27th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Ugh…. I’m nervous right now because I bought a new laptop and it’s being sent via USPS. I didn’t have an option… they left all the peripherals sitting on the front porch yesterday. $300 worth of stuff, just sitting there, marked DELL as big as life. I’m feeling very lucky that someone didn’t just decide to walk off with it. Will they do the same with my laptop? Who knows!
All that to say — I feel your pain. Maybe you can request that folks no longer use USPS for you? … and people wonder why postage still keeps going up.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Ah, THAT’S why it once took over 3 weeks for our mortgage payment to get to the Georgia mortgage holder, so we got slapped with a late payment fee!
Now you may be forced to go the “rent the big P.O. box” route, IF those even take packages.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:44 am
My boss and I both grew up in South Georgia. Ironically, each of us were told in our very first job evaluations that we “do not suffer fools lightly.” After having very important document after very important document (original Wills, original deeds, our firm’s bills) vaporize into thin air, we sat down with the postmaster to try to decide what was happening. So, they can’t blame your complaints on your Yankee heritage. The natives have issues, too.
Notice, I didn’t say that our discussions helped. We just send everything that is even somewhat important via Fed Ex these days.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:49 am
Yikes, Ladies! I’m a freelance illustrator from Upstate NY, and while I have never had difficulties with the good ol’ USPS, I’m wondering if it’s a Georgia thing?? With your cautionary tales behind my thoughts, if I ever have a need to do business in Georgia I believe I will use FedEx!
Oh, and Mir…I agree with you about Northeastern weather. As I sit at my computer working I am looking at a dreary, gray-day mix of rain/sleet/snow going on outside my window. There are just too many days of this sort of thing for 3/4 of the calendar year!! Maybe I should contemplate a move to Southern Georgia, despite the mail woes, huh? Ach, there’s always something!
April 1st, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Oh, man, if it’s even the teensiest bit important, I go FedEx. Our mail carrier is a sweet woman, but our local office is AWFUL. (My husband went to pick up a package, a package containing a PAIR of SKIS, and the man behind the counter said, upon Will’s helpfully alerting him that the package was a PAIR of SKIS, that he had to look through all the envelopes first to make sure it wasn’t there before he went to the back. Because that is apparently how you do it.)