On Jan 9, 2008, at 22:02, Sue Fink wrote:
the mail does sometimes take a very long time to arrive in distant
parts at this time
of the year.
Not just in the distant parts, either :)
My best-ever "mailing around Christmas" story was this:
Some years ago, in the first week of December, I sent off my renewal
for OIDFA. The US OIDFA treasurer has a foreign-sounding first name and
surname. She lives in California, in a town with a Spanish name, on a
street ditto. So, I send off the letter, with CA and the zipcode and
think nothink of it.
5 weeks later, I get my letter back, looking rather beat up for its
long travels and with two official stamps. One says: "the names of
foreign couintries should not be abbreviated, but spelled out in full".
The second stamp builds on the first: "postage insufficient for
overseas mailing".
During the holiday period, a lot of extra folk -- only partly trained
-- are hired by the PO to help with the holiday overload. So, someone
saw a foreign-looking name of the addressee, and the street and the
town, then missed the fact that CA (especially in conjunction with the
correct zipcode) is an abbreviation not for, say, "Colombia", but for
California... And off the letter went, on some crazy wild goose chase
:)
Come Christmas time, you never know where or when your missive is going
to land. 8 times out of 10, the PO will deliver just fine. But, once in
a while...
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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