Wednesday, December 12, 2018

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.



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