Someone is going to have to explain to me how a package started in Pennsauken, then went to Edison, then back to Pennsauken, then up to Hamilton, back to Pennsauken again, finally over to Barrington, and then was put on a truck for delivery to Ocean City, yet the delivery estimate has not changed.
I am also sometimes confused yet amazed by the traveling mail sometimes takes before it gets to me. And once, how it appeared to go somewhere it didn't. A couple years ago I sent a package home to my folks -- in Iowa -- via USPS. I sent it priority, so it came with a tracking number. After a couple days, it said it was delivered. My parents denied having received it. Uh oh. I checked the tracking more closely and it said it was delivered to an address in Oregon.
I called the USPS and asked, "What's up with this?" and the next half a day was spent by USPS employees in Delaware, Iowa, and Oregon talking to each other, and me, trying to figure out what happened. After a few dead ends, they sent me an email of their photograph taken of the delivered package's postage label and while it was grainy, I could tell it was not the one I had put on my package, because it wasn't the same price. It was finally concluded that the priority tracking bar code label had come off my package and gotten stuck to this other package that went to Oregon. Two days later, the package I sent to my parents arrived in Iowa (not on priority time scale, but whatever, by then I was just glad it made it).
While this was a bit of a screw-up, I do appreciate the USPS going to that work trying to figure out what happened for me. They could have said "Who knows and frankly we don't care" and then in a couple days the package would have shown up anyway but instead I got several calls from these post offices with information working on it and we finally figured it out.
Post-office related, in high school, a friend of mine went to Africa for a school mission trip for a few weeks. Something like a year after she returned to the US, she got a letter from some man she met there in which he asked her to marry him so he could come to the US. Now, the relevance of this story is that the way he addressed the envelope involved absolutely NOTHING required to get a letter from anywhere to anywhere else. Yet somehow, the USPS got it to her. It took a long time, but it got there.
I know there are people complain about the USPS, but I remain a loyal and true customer, not just because normally, my mail gets where I want it to when I need it to, but then there are things like this that kind of impress me about it.
