Blame the Blamable

The worst week of my existence on Earth strikes again!

The week of December 16, 2002, had it all. Pipes exploding and leaking all manner of used and unused water from my bathroom into my neighbor’s apartment, discovering that a massive publicly-visible project at work was two months overdue, and the culmination of my two-year run as a married guy crashing down into the fiery wreckage of divorce.

My unfettered rage has since cooled.

The pipes were repaired after only three more incidents. My landlords simply replaced the entire plumbing infrastructure of the house. The work project was salvaged and completed thanks to a series of panicked phone calls and sheer, unbridled luck. And the divorce proceedings were serving only as the crushing denouement of a several-month-long self-esteem extrication anyway.

Two months have since passed, and I continue to slowly emerge from the haze cognizant only of having spent a lot of time banging my head against a wall and trying not to further disrupt my plumbing by making use of it.

But it’s not over yet. Like the gift that keeps on giving (sort of like a magazine subscription from hell) I’m also out $100. Sure, it doesn’t seem like much in retrospect. It’s more insulting than anything, kind of a final Bronx cheer as I storm off the premises.

Turns out a Christmas gift that made a $100 dent on my credit card never made it back to the return facility whence it came. Unfortunately it was mailed during the accursed week. Why did the package never arrive? Why didn’t I get a refund? Somewhere along the line someone simply slacked off or cut a corner, and now it’s going to cost me a couple of days of work to get that money back.

I could blame the gift retailer directly. Most likely the guy opening return packages the week after Christmas just forgot to give me any credit. Maybe having the item and detailed invoice directly in front of him with clear return requests printed on the outside of the package was somehow confusing. Or it’s a massive management conspiracy to avoid refunding credit cards unless threatened with litigation. Yet the company is willing to give me the refund provided I can confirm the package was delivered back to them.

Hapless citizen: “Here is money. Please bring this package to Virginia.”
Post office gatekeeper: “Can do. Thank you.”
Two months later.
Hapless citizen: “Was my package in fact brought to Virginia? Here is a receipt of our earlier transaction, complete with package number.”
Post office gatekeeper: “We have absolutely no way of knowing.”

This is not the correct answer. The correct answer should have been, “Of course it was. What, would we take your money then just simply not deliver your package?” Even an acceptable answer would have been, “Oh, I see you have a receipt with a package number on it. We can check our database to confirm delivery.” An unacceptable answer implies that despite a detailed record of my package being sent and paid for, they can only tell me that they can’t tell me whether it was delivered or not because no delivery confirmation fee was paid. It further implies that there was every chance the package was not delivered but instead is now being used as a doorstop in postal facilities in Orono, Maine.

How did the post office achieve such leniency? You must always pay in advance but it’s commonly accepted that parcels occasionally vanish without explanation. We just accept this. What if your favorite bookstore operated in a similar manner? You’d go in, ask the clerk for a copy of The World’s Best Science Fiction 1977. He would say, “Yes, we have that. It costs $10.” You hand him ten dollars. He just stands there. Soon he notices that you haven’t left yet. “May I help you?” he asks completely innocently.

“You didn’t give me my book,” you reply, confused and angry, forceful and confident on the outside but crying and upset on the inside. “Can I have it now?”

“I’m sorry, you should have received it already. You might wait a few days and see if it shows up,” he says, trying to be helpful.

Trying to remain civil, you play along. You stand there patiently waiting as other people come to the store, pay for books, are given their books, and leave without thinking about it. Eventually you ask him about it again. “Is my book available yet?”

He appears to have no recollection of your transaction, even if you wad the receipt up and jam it in his ear. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We can’t track whether we ever gave you your book.”

“Well, I don’t have it, do I?” you reply, knowing quite well what the answer is going to be.

“We can’t say whether you have it currently. We can only say that we don’t know if it was delivered.”

“So you can’t say anything at all then.”

“Right.” He smiles gently. “Would you like to try purchasing it again?”

At this point you can either fly into a foaming primal rage and kick various things around the store until you wear down in an exhausted slump. Or you can fork over another ten bucks and hope for the best. The ugly implication here is that just paying for delivery doesn’t really mean anything. They can get away with not delivering anything they want. If you want them to actually be sure to deliver it, you have to pay extra so they can’t lie about it later. Certified mail, insured mail, registered mail, delivery confirmation request, return receipts. Any of those flags and they deliver it without difficulty or hesitation using the finest technology in the world. Skip on the extras and you may as well crush your property to dust and bring it to the wrong hemisphere yourself to save them the trouble.

Back to the most recently displaced parcel. Despite their ongoing scam, I don’t really even blame the post office for my missing package. I don’t blame extensive conspiracy on the part of any of the people who made the mistake. I won’t even be seeking vengeance despite my hair-trigger temper and thorough knowledge of untraceable poisons.

I blame myself. The mistake was made on my end by attempting to return the package the wrong week, the cursed week. It was destined to be lost somehow.

That week was historically awful and I’m still snippy about it. But plumbing problems happen, and by definition work invariably causes distress and fury. Divorce is way too complex to summarize in a thousand words of clever simile (however, one can clarify it in three easy words that I’ll leave up to the reader to guess). So we’re down to a perpetually deserving target, the post office. Mocking them is something everyone can enjoy.

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