Mail Fail

We've had terrible luck with mail this year. Not having a fixed physical address for "home" we instead have a mailbox at a small copy shop in West Seattle. West Seattle is not particularly near to any of the places we ever keep the boat or lay our heads, but the shop owner is a terrific guy whom we have both used for various business services for years and his flexibility and service are well worth the extra distance when it's time to collect.

One of the services he offers is to bundle up your waiting mail and forwarding it to wherever you happen to be, a handy thing if you happen to be in Canada or some place unusually distant from West Seattle. Or at least we thought it might be handy when we headed north this year, so after about the first month we'd been gone, we had him package up our stuff and send it general delivery to a Canada Post office in a city we planned to be visiting in a few days. That was in late July. When did we finally get that mail? Yesterday, after the package finally cleared Customs both ways and skulked back to its point of origin, here in West Seattle. Turns out that mail to or from Canada isn't all that reliable, and isn't even remotely predictable.

The Canada Post folks told us a package could be held for up to two weeks in Customs, and that they would then hold something another two weeks in general delivery before returning it. If you do a little math on that, you will quickly realize that you have a window of about a month during which you must be near the place you hope to collect the mail from; if it comes through immediately, you only have two weeks to pick it up before it gets sent back, but if it gets hung up in customs, you may have to wait two weeks before you can pick it up. If you're only going to be gone for three months, that is not tremendously useful.

In the event, it seems like it got held up far longer than two weeks in Canadian customs, so it's a good thing we didn't hang around waiting for it.

Besides that, we tried sending a gift back from up there which never arrived (or hasn't yet, at any rate; maybe it come through in another three months).

But it's not just Canada; we're having as many problems here in the States. We sent a birthday card ahead from Friday Harbor which never reached the intended recipient, nor has it yet been returned. Maybe the mail boat sunk and we didn't hear about it.

And I've been having a run-of-the-mill streak of bad luck this past week, missing by hours or days a series of important letters or packages that have come in. Either Mandy or I have had to go collect the mail just about every day this week for something that came in the previous day that we need, only after we had already checked in. Twice, we've gotten the call that it showed up less than an hour after we had been there.

At least my e-mail is still getting through. I think.