No Mail Guarantee this Christmas

Canada Post says it can't guarantee your mail will get delivered in time for Christmas this year. We had a postal strike, after all.  Mail had piled sky high at major distributing sites even before people started ordering gifts online or adding to the pile by mailing early cards and long distance parcels.

I seem to have been caught in this mess too as I ordered something from Amazon back in November. It got shipped out on November 27, and I was given a tracking number. I have been able to watch this parcel since it left Amazon.

Even though it said there was a delay in delivery due to weather or natural disaster it got to Ottawa quickly enough. I went to the post office the day after it arrived there, expecting to pick it up. It wasn't there. It didn't come the next day either so I used the tracking number and discovered an amazing thing. My parcel had gone to Winnipeg!

Why would my parcel go to Winnipeg when it got so close to me so quickly?  It had to be a mistake, I thought, and it somehow got into the wrong pile. Then it came back to Ottawa. Each day the message continued to say that there was a delay due to weather or natural disaster, but we all know this was a man made disaster created at the post office due to failed negotiations or poor timing by the government as to when to order the postal workers back to work. True, the postal workers have every right to strike. If the government wanted to mess with that, and put them back to work, they should have done it before the piles became so unmanageable that the postal workers not only didn't get what they were after but also had to work so much overtime to try and clear out the mountains that have accumulated at the busiest time of the year.

The next time I looked, my parcel was in Montreal!  What???  How could that happen?  Why was my parcel getting to Ottawa, and then moving on again?  Could it be the mountains there were already so high the workers just waved at the trucks and said, "No way are you unloading here! We don't have room for any more!"  I don't know but what other reason could there be?

Meanwhile two of my friends ordered something from Amazon and their orders arrived in less than a week. I'm wondering if they have an Amazon Prime membership. It's Christmas and you can have that for free for 30 days, so why didn't I think of that?  It would likely have meant my parcel would have been sent by priority post. Why else would theirs get here before mine?


I just checked again on Tuesday and it's finally gotten closer to me. It actually traveled in the right direction this time! It seems it got stuck again though as it spent 4 days just 12 miles away before
finally showing up here today.  Oh, and look, they did stick a priority post label on it.  Can you imagine how long it would have taken if they had not done that? 

What ever happened to  "Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"?  Oh ya, I forgot, that's the American creed not ours. Ours is simply, “From anywhere … to anyone.”  It doesn't promise a quick delivery, or even a direct route.

It's All in the Stars

Apparently, according to astrological charts,  Mercury is in retrograde and this week we are all told to "expect cheques in the mail to be late. Postal and courier services will suffer from delays. Everyone will be dogged by silly errors and confused communications."

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm certainly experiencing something along those lines.

I won a $100 from Subway early in January, and while others who won this contest seem to have received their gift card, mine has not yet arrived.  I put in a query a few weeks ago, and they sent me a form that needed to be filled out and sent back. I did that, and they promised to mail the card out on January 20th. If I had not sent in the query, I likely never would have received the form.

It's now two weeks later, and my prize is still not here. I know Canadian mail is slow, but it doesn't take two weeks for an envelope to go from anywhere in this country, to someplace else in the same country.  I told them that and they are now looking into it, though that was several days ago, and I haven't heard anything since.

I even told them how much I'd love to tell my blog readers about experimenting with different combinations of Subway sandwiches that I haven't tried yet.  Let's hope I get that chance.

Meanwhile the Linen Chest was having a 75% off sale and I found something on their website that I've been wanting for months.  Hunting for, in fact. I even put it on my Christmas list, but I didn't get it.  I don't often buy stuff on line, and after my experience before Christmas, one would think I'd know better.  But I wanted new pasta bowls and this set was perfect, so I put in the order. 

The original e-mail advertising the 75% off sale also came with an offer of 10% off if I signed up for their newsletter, so I did that.  I expected an e-mail giving me that additional code to plug into my order, but it didn't come, so I put the order through.  Several days later I got another e-mail saying there was still something in my shopping cart, and if I completed the order, they would give me 5% off.  I went to look at my account, and it appeared that my order was "processing", but it did indeed show the pasta bowls sitting in the shopping cart.  To me, "processing" meant the order had gone though just fine.  I wanted the bowls but didn't want to duplicate the order, so I decided to e-mail them and ask.  I also asked why I would be satisfied with a 5% discount when they originally promised me a 10% one that never came through. 

I got a response that said, "normally one receives this notice if they did not complete their purchase or completed the transaction from a different computer or browser."  That wasn't the case here though.  They then offered to take the extra 5 % off this order if I transferred the offer I received back to them by e-mail.  I eventually figured out they meant I should forward that message to them, so I did, and got that extra 5% after all.  I also got a another e-mail from them giving me that original 10% discount off my next order.

Checking my account once again, I see the order is still "processing"  but at least now there is nothing in my shopping cart.  I have no idea when the package will arrive, but at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if something was broken.  That wouldn't be the fault of the Linen Chest, or the Post Office, of course.  It would just be my luck.....or perhaps I could blame it on the stars.

Did I mention I've been getting lovely e-mails in my g-mail account, complete with photos of a lovely little girl, that were all meant for someone else?  I alerted the person who was sending them, and he seems to have it all straightened out now. The e-mails were meant for someone with my last name and my first initial, so I can see how this could happen.  It's just the timing that seems to fit into the predictions at the moment.

According to astrologer Georgia Nichols, the kind of mix up and confusion I have been experiencing will continue until March 20.  Oh Joy.  Can you just imagine how bad the Ides of March will be?

But on March 21st, I get to celebrate my 40th Wedding Anniversary, and it should be good as I will be in the clear by then.  Hopefully......