Please bring back the Pony Express!!!

So as you all know, I sell on ebay and thus use the postal service for delivery.  On orders in the United States I have tracking free.  Buy through ebay and track it righ to the door. Not so on International orders.  Oh, I get a tracking number, but it ends at the edge of the ocean or the Canadian border, so I am used to things diappearing into a customs office and never coming back.  Or if a package arrives at a post office and is not picked up I see it wend it's way back to my door.  But from here to Oregon is pretty much a straight shot, or so I thought!

A lady in Eugene, Oregon bought a book on November 13.  I immediately posted it at my Wedgewood office.  It left there sometime that day and arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah 8 days later.  That must have been one helluva trip  It remained in  Salt Lake City for several days until they got tired of talking to me.  It  then came back to Denver.  After due time it caught a wind and headed out west.

It then spent 2 days flying to Washington.  After spending the night in Federal Way, Washington it spent 2 days flying to Eugene, Oregon.  So 15 days later it arrived on her door step. Below is my tracking record.  

This is a post-only message. Please do not respond.

Lou Mercer has requested that you receive a USPS Tracking™ update, as shown below.

USPS Tracking™ e-mail update information provided by the U.S. Postal Service.

Label Number: 9449009699938911873408

Service Type: USPS Tracking^™

Shipment Activity	Location	Date & Time
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Delivered, Left with Individual	EUGENE, OR 97405	November 28, 2014 11:58 am
Arrived at Post Office	EUGENE, OR 97405	November 28, 2014 8:56 am
Departed USPS Facility	FEDERAL WAY, WA 98003	November 26, 2014 2:40 am
Arrived at USPS Facility	FEDERAL WAY, WA 98003	November 25, 2014 6:59 pm
Departed USPS Facility	DENVER, CO 80217	November 23, 2014 3:00 am
Arrived at USPS Origin Facility	DENVER, CO 80217	November 23, 2014 2:21 am
Departed USPS Facility	SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84199	November 21, 2014 6:55 pm
Arrived at USPS Facility	SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84199	November 21, 2014 3:10 pm
Picked Up	PUEBLO, CO 81005	November 13, 2014 1:36 pm
Pre-Shipment Info Sent to USPS		November 13, 2014

Reminder: USPS Tracking™ by email

Seems like the real vacuum hole seeems to be beween Pueblo, Colorado and Salt  Lake City, but that is not the case.  Only God knows where that thing was.  So after many weeks I was most happy to find this email in my box:

Holy Moley, it's on the correct edge of the country!  lol

Happy Thanksgiving, Lou

:-)  Jeanne

And finally, this one:

EUREKA!!!!  Silly Sally has arrived!

:-)

-Jeanne

Now I just went and checked out the Pony Express and copied what was there for you to read:  The service opened officially on April 3, 1860, when riders left simultaneously from St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. The first westbound trip was made in 9 days and 23 hours and the eastbound journey in 11 days and 12 hours. The pony riders Annual Pony Express Re-Ride covered 250 miles in a 24-hour day.

So am I off base in suggesting that they might bring back the Pony Express?  I figure I could shave a good 3-4 days off my delivery time.  Let me know.

In the meantime, I do hope Jeanne is enjoying Silly Sally.  I want to thank her for being so patient.  Most people would have given up early in the game.  Sure hope to do business with her again.

I'm just gonna run to the post office...

Now those words are an understatement if I ever made one!  To begin with, the closest post office I can run to is over a mile away.  It is a sub station and I gave up going there because they cringe when I show up with packages.  See, I buy my postage online.  It is cheaper.  Seems like enough incentive for me!  But the substation does not get to collect a "pick up fee" from the post office so it is a free gratis thing.  UPS pays the stations a $1 pick up fee.  Course when they sell the postage there is a profit built in to the price.  But not with the USPS. 

Now back to my packages I have so neatly packed and labeled with my online package.  I have padded them and made them as sturdy as possible to avoid breakage because I know they are going to be dropped at least 4 times by the post office and way more than that by FedEx or UPS.  UPS gives free insurance for the first $100. Post Office gives you jack. 

After I pack them, measure them and weigh them  I print out my postage and apply the label to the box.  I then need to drop my boxes some where.  They have the 13 ounce rule, you know.  That means I have to take it in and hand it to the clerk.  The clerk will ask me, "Any thing explosive, breakable, liquid or illegal in here?"  I always say "No" and then I am done.  I especially like waiting in a long line with heavy boxes for this ritual to take place.  Occasionally I will get a clerk that will motion me to put them in the canvas box on wheels and then he will smile at me and I will leave.  That does not happen very often.  More like it happened once.

Now, I want to go on record here as saying Homeland Security and all that is just great.  After I leave the post office I feel I have been thoroughly  processed and my packages do not carry bombs or any of that stuff.  I am on first name basis with most of the clerks around town.  But occasionally some little guy gets himself hired and his job description seems to contain the words "must be able to piss an old lady off and make her cry in frustration."  Yesterday I met one such fellow.  No doubt he was promoted to something before I got to my car.  He was good!

The upshot was my one box had the word "Ale" on it.  Ale is hazardous.  Course it was not ale since someone had already drank all of it and I am assuming it was not hazardous since he was still alive or at least I assume so since I did not read in the obituaries of anyone dieing directly after drink one bottle.  So I told him that apparently the word  "paint"ball on the other box made it hazardous as well.  He was in complete agreement.  So I drove the 10 miles home, unpacked the boxes after carefully cutting the label off with a razor blade, turned the boxes wrong side out, repacked them, taped on the labels and took them back to town to the one in Belmont where the lady likes me.  I told her my tale of woe and she said "He must have been having a very bad day!"  Hey, Janie, what do you think he did for my day?  She thought that was funny.  Never was a very good comedienne, but it worked with her.  May have missed my calling.

Now get this, a year or so ago I sent a seed catcher to my friend in Niagara  Falls.  Then he ordered two more.  He then decided to send the first one back and have the size of elastic changed.  So I put a box with a return postage label all printed out to me and enclosed it so he could return the first one.  He dropped it in the mail box to come to me.  Three days later, it was returned to him because he had not taken it inside the post office and they thought it was a bomb because it was over the 13 ounce limit.  So I had spent $4.95 for the label.  Now he had to spend another $4.95 for the new label.  But the most asinine part was that it had been in the mail system for 3 days being returned to him.  It was never opened and he bought a new label and put it over the old label with out anybody ever looking inside.  So this made the $10 seed catcher cost a total of $14.90 in postage for no reason what so ever. If there had been a bomb in the goofy thing it surely would have detonated shortly after being put in the box. Or at the very least some time during the next day or so.

Then there was the time the doorbell rang and there stood the man who lived up on Bronco with a soggy box in his hand.  Hmmm.  Lou Mercer, yep that is me.  Oh gee is that the MP3 player I have been expecting?  Only silly me, I was looking in the mailbox for it, not in the irrigation ditch where he found it.  Let's see, that was about the time they took another 2 cent raise on postage.  Very well deserved if I do say so myself. 

So, I set here and think about my United States Postal Service and shake my head in wonderment.  Seems like we had a pretty good thing going when the Pony Express was in action.  Grab a saddle bag and ride like hell!

Back to the going postal thing.  See, I know these guys get a big kick out of being mean to us little old ladies, but I think they are also mean to each other.  Maybe they have left their station and gone across town and been mistreated by someone in another station and they are just getting revenge.  Why doesn't the powers that be teach these people to smile?  I have always found that sugar catches a lot my flies then vinegar.

You know what the first thing I learned when I went out into the work force?  I learned something called Customer Service and the golden rule to that was that the customer was always right.  Know who paid my salary?  The customer.  If we did not have customers I did not have a job so i always wanted them to come back.  Not so at the post office.  Or as far as that goes most government jobs.  Stop and think for one minute about what we have done to ourselves.  We sent a bunch of guys to Washington to pass a bunch of laws to make our life easier.  Then they had to appoint a bunch of committees to oversee the laws and make sure they were working.  Then we had to have people to check on the committees to be sure the committees were doing there job.  So now, guess what!  Everyone but you and me is now working for the government.  No wonder the post office people are so mean. I am the only one not working for them and they are afraid I will quit paying my taxes, so they want to make me suicidal and hope I do not have a will so the government can take all I own and put it back into circulation.

I keep hearing that the postal service is in trouble.  You know, I do not doubt that.  Gone are the days when you wrote a note and put it in an envelope and mailed it off to someone in another city.  Now we have a cell phone in our pocket and a computer on standby and we can touch someone electronically in a nano second.  But here is what I want you to ponder, if you will; Has electronics and such brought about the downfall of the postal system, or are the cell phone and email a result of a postal service that did not serve our needs?  Ah, it is indeed a quandary.  Might be too much for this feeble mind to comprehend.