informed

Do you have informed delivery from the US Postal Service?  I do!  It's a helpful thing!

Each day we have mail on the truck, I get an email letting me know what's coming.  It even includes a scanned image of each piece of mail. That way I know to freak out if something doesn't show up, and it also allows me to fret over how often stuff goes missing. 

I can click a link to let the USPS know if something didn't arrive.  I've done that a couple of times.  Nothing further happened, but I had the satisfaction of clicking the link. 

There was one instance, however, when a package went missing.  Magnum ordered something online, and we got an alert saying that it was delivered to the mailbox.  Turns out it wasn't.  The product itself was a minor thing, but it bothered me that we didn't get it when the post office said we did. 

Magnum, a.k.a. worst-case-scenario man, immediately surmised that low life hoodlums had stolen it from the mailbox while leaving all the other mail intact.  I held out on the hopes that the package had just been misdelivered - as has been known to  happen all too often. 

I went to our online USPS account and reported the missing package.  The next day, I surprisingly got a call from a real person!  She was quite friendly, and not in a fake kind of way.  Apparently, it's her job to train mail carriers and punish them soundly when they deliver things to wrong addresses. 

She assured me they were working to track down the package and sincerely apologized while adding, "Oh well, job security I suppose!"

The postal service never found it, but that's because our non-hoodlum neighbor who'd accidentally received it just did the job for them by bringing it to our house. 

So where was I?  Oh yes, informed delivery.  It's a good thing. 

This morning, I opened my email to see this lovely image:

Well... crapola.  If it gets lost, can I pretend I never knew?