Ruth and I have our mail forwarded from Michigan to Florida each winter. Each year brings a new challenge. I fill out all the papers as instructed, cross my fingers, and hope that everything works out. I make it a point to meet with the post mistress each year to make sure that I do everything that I can to insure a smooth process.
A few years ago we spent two months in Palm Springs, California followed by a month in Florida. I knew that would blow the post office officials’ minds, so I asked how I should proceed. The post mistress suggested that she save and package my mail for bulk delivery. “I’ll save it for you, place it in a large envelope, and mail it directly to any address you provide. It will cost $15.00 for each mailing. You just decide how often you want it sent.”
Sounded good to me. After careful thought, I decided that she could send it every two weeks. She told me that if she sent it on Friday, “You’ll have it on Monday. Tuesday at the latest.” I paid for a total of six forwarded packages at $15.00 each. I believed that the $90.00 investment would insure that everything went smoothly. The first four would be sent to a condo in Palm Springs and the last two to our rental in Florida.
There had been years in the past when the untimely forwarding of my mail resulted in bills being received, and thus paid, late. I ended up paying late fees, being contacted by my insurance man to make sure that I still wanted coverage, getting calls from utility companies, and being threatened by collection agencies. All this occurred because my mail hadn’t been forwarded in a timely fashion.
The new process worked well. It was usually later than Monday or Tuesday as she had indicated, but each package arrived within the following week. It was timely enough for me to pay everything on time. All went well until I made the switch to Florida. Ruth and I moved as planned, but the post mistress continued to send the packages to California. When the first package didn’t arrive in Florida according to plan, I called the post mistress and she confessed that she had made an “error” and sent a fifth package to California. “I promise I’ll send the next one to Florida.” She did.
I contacted my condo rental guy in California to see if “a package of mail” had been received. He said, “No.” And then I said, “Please be on the lookout for it, and give me a call when you receive it. It should be there by now, but if it’s not, it should be there shortly.”
He called about three weeks after we returned to Michigan. I had contacted him a couple of times in the interim to continue checking, and each time I received the same “nothing has come” reply. When he finally contacted me he told me that he had found the package in the rental “after the next renters checked out”. It seems that “the renters” found the envelope in the mailbox and “stuck it on a shelf”. Luckily for me, there were no bills to pay in the package that he forwarded two months after the fact.
Why share this tale today? When Ruth and I went to Cuba last April, Ruth sent a postcard to our home in Michigan because we were heading back there the following week. (She wanted to receive some mail from a foreign country.) We received it in Florida last week.
The card had been placed in a box in Cuba in April, received in Michigan – seven months later – and forwarded to Florida on November 11. It arrived on December 7th.
The Cuban mail system makes my local service issues look like an inconvenient truth and adds one more reason why everything should be set up on “Autopay”.
Timing is everything.
I agree