My regular postal carrier is the best.  She always comes to my door with a smile on her face, never complains about my pile of packages, and scans them all for me immediately.  On Wednesdays I volunteer in my 6yo’s classroom, and after I hurry home to make it back in time before my postal carrier arrives.  Yesterday I returned home to find a post-it note on my door letting me know I had missed her.  Darn it!  Not the end of the world, but disappointing.  I have a PO that is only a couple miles away, but because of where it is situated it takes at least 20 minutes to get there, drop off, and get back home.  Between a conference at my boys’ school in the afternoon and theater tickets in the evening (I got to see Hamilton! So good!!) and a dozen other things I wanted to cross off my to do list, I felt like I was running really short on time.  I toyed with the idea of waiting to drop off my packages when I drove by the PO later in the day on the way to pick up my friend for the play.  But, I wouldn’t be driving by the PO until about 45 minutes after the last pick-up time of the day, meaning my packages would be delayed a day.  So, I loaded all of my packages into a big tote and was heading out the door to pick up my boys from school and make our way to the PO when my postal carrier arrived.  She came back!!!  She finished her route and doubled back to pick up my packages.  SO. Darn. Nice.  I thanked her at least a half dozen times.  She is the best.

I always buy her gift cards at Christmastime, but lately I have been wanting to do more, and this was the cherry on top.  Do you do any random nice things for your postal carrier(s)?  What do you do?  Please share!

So, last Saturday I had a bit of Post Office drama.  And I did it entirely to myself.  Uggggghh.

It was a busy day (youngest had basketball, oldest had a cub scout service project), so it was afternoon by the time we were back home and I got around to packaging my sales up for the day.  (I like to ship every day – including Saturdays and Sundays!  Shipping is my least favorite part, and I get cranky about it if I get too far behind.)  I had quite a few sales to package up, and the last pick-up time at my Post Office on Saturdays is 3:45 p.m.   I got everything packaged up, the last sale being from Amazon (merchant fulfilled, something I had listed long ago), and headed to the PO, getting there right at 3:45.   So far, so good.

When we got back home I went back to my computer to respond to a couple Best Offers that I had received but hadn’t had time to look over.  My Amazon seller’s account was still up on my screen, and I noticed it said that I had one item that still needed to be shipped.  That made me pause.  How strange.  Was it possible I had sold something else on Amazon?  Ha, if only.

I looked at the screen some more (I rarely ship from Amazon, and am not very familiar with the layout), and could tell that it was saying that I had not yet shipped the package that I had JUST dropped off at the PO!  How could that be?  And then I realized . . . uh oh . . . dang.it.anyway!  There are two buttons that I could select when getting ready to print a shipping label.  The one on the bottom of the screen that says something like “confirm and purchase shipping” and one on the top that says something like “print test label”.   Wanna guess which one I chose?  Yeah, not the right one.

So of course I was immediately worried.  What will happen? My package doesn’t have actual shipping on it!  What should I do?  The package has already been dropped off at the PO!  Argh.

I pulled up local PO phone numbers on my computer, and every PO in my town listed a local phone number EXCEPT the one I use, which only listed a 1-800 #.  Why???

Feeling a bit desperate I printed out the correct shipping label, loaded my boys back into our car, and head back to the PO.  I could see employees moving around in the back, even though our PO isn’t open to the public on Saturdays.  I banged on the door to their work area several times.  No response.  I tried looking up the local phone number for the PO again.  For some reason on my phone it came right up, so I called!  I was in in the lobby of the Post Office, and could hear the phone ringing on their end in the back somewhere.  Someone answered!  Hooray!  I explained that I had mailed a package and it had the wrong label on it, and the employee said he would be right out.  Double hooray!

The worker came out and opened up the drop bin.  There was only one package in it, and he just handed it to me.  This was a bit disturbing, because it wasn’t my package.  His willingness to assume that it was mine and just hand it over was disconcerting.  But not my focus right now, so I didn’t really dwell on it.  I explained that I dropped off my package earlier right at the final pick-up time, about printing the test label, blah blah blah, he knew just the package I was talking about because he had already set it aside to return to sender.  He got it for me, I took off the test label, put on the real label, and handed it back to the postal worker.  An hour wasted, but other than that all I felt was success!  Problem solved, and I didn’t have to dwell on it the next few days, wondering where oh where the package might be.

Anybody else have any eBay or PO drama that’s come about totally of their own accord?  I could use a chuckle.  (Insert face/palm here!)