Category Archive: problems

My regular mail person is pretty decent.  My mailman before her could walk on water.  And then there are the substitutes.  Some of them are incredible, given they don’t really know the names or the route.  And then there are the substitutes from Hell. 

Earlier this year, my physician sent me some legal documents I needed to file.  Her office attended to this immediately because the papers were time sensitive.  After a week, I contacted them.  The document had gone out 8 days ago.  They reissued the paperwork.  Another week went by.  Their office never received any returns, and I never received the original paperwork they sent out.  The deadline loomed.  They issued it again.  I was two days short of being past the deadline, when out of desperation, I asked a friend to pick it up.  She pony expressed it with her car the next day.  I hit the post office that afternoon, making the deadline by one day.  The 3rd try by my doctor’s office arrived a week after the deadline had passed.

I live in one of the “better” zipcodes but when there’s a bad sub, the delivery service is beyond substandard.  This is in sharp contrast to some of the really concientious subs, who ring my bell when there’s a package.  But I digress. 

My landlord told me about the time that one of the utility companies called him to find out where he moved the building to, since the bills for the building were stamped, “moved, left no forwarding address.”  So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that getting my old medical records from one of my dentists is turning into something approaching the scaling of the Patagonias with both hands tied behind one’s back. 

When I used to have my bank hold my bank statements, once they told me they hadn’t received them for any of their customers.  Three months later they all showed up.  The problem was that a bad sub had dumped the entire bag of mail and left it in the hallway of some office building, and it stayed there until someone finally called the Post Office.

Several weeks ago my old dentist’s office prepared a package of my records per my request.  A week later I received a call that the entire package came back as:  “Undeliverable” because no such person lived there.  Well, since I’ve lived here a very long time, we know that’s a bunch of bullcream.  The office gal repackaged it, and sent it off.  Last week I received another call.  The newly packaged file came back again, “Addressee Unknown.”  She read the package details to me – everything was correct.

It’s now been about a week, and if I don’t receive it by Monday, I will need to ask someone who works in the area to pick it up for me, or I’ll have to clear my schedule and waste half a day going down to their office to do the work that the Post Office seems unable to do.  If I was a betting type of person, I should probably just ask a friend to pick it up for me…