Bulldogs, snakes and me
by Matt Worley

It was already a bad day.
My one weekday off, and I spent it running around the state for five hours, accomplishing nothing. This was the attitude I brought to the situation. It was, however, nothing compared to the attitude of the establishment. Don't worry, character development will follow.

For business reasons, I have a separate mail box at one of those independent mail box places (okay, it's a Mailboxes, Inc.). The reason I use an independent mail box is simple. I need to be able to receive UPS, Fed Ex and other shipments that are not accepted at regular post office boxes. You may wonder why a post office box (which, one would assume, is just like a regular address) cannot accept these kind of shipments. That answer is also simple. The postal service doesn't want to acknowledge the competition (or do the extra work of accepting mail from an outside source). There might be a mutual agreement by all of the shipping companies about this practice, I don't know. All I know is that the only people this screws are common customers.

The day before the bad day, I received reports that mail sent to my business (a little magazine called "Lies") had been sent back by the post office as "undeliverable." Now, this is quite strange since I always fill out forwarding cards for every possible name and address every time I move. I have been moving quite a bit in the last year or so (there was Albuquerque to Florida back to Albuquerque, etc.), but up until a few weeks ago (apparently) everything seemed to be working fine.

The little twist in my story appears here. When I moved back to Albuquerque, I continued my use of the independent mail box (actually using the exact same one I had before our detour to Florida). This was partly to avoid confusion, but also to thank the people at this business who had helped me in the past. The mail box place, however, moved into a different building about fifteen days after my arrival back in New Mexico, which necessitated another change of address. But, as I said, all of this forwarding was working until a few weeks ago.

I guess the post office got tired of doing their job. Maybe it was the stress of delivering a bunch of mail addressed to one building over to another building about two hundred feet away. Maybe there was a perpetual full moon in their mind, or possibly the post office is not happy about having to compete for customers. Whatever the reason, the postal service has decided it can no longer forward mail from an independent mail box business.

This means (of course) that all the mail sent to Florida is being sent back to people as "undeliverable." All of my mail sent to the old mail box address (a mere two hundred feet away from the new address) is being sent back as "undeliverable." All of my protests and exhortations have been met with one rather stupid answer. "Tell everyone your new address." Duh.

The official explanation of the post office's inability to forward the mail is that Mailboxes, Inc.'s are private businesses, and the post office doesn't recognize individual box holders. Never mind that the old office space is sitting empty (and not receiving any mail). Never mind that the post office was able to forward the mail with no problems for three months. Never mind that I was told there was nothing I could do about the situation because the post office doesn't care. Never mind that the post office is a government agency created to work for citizens (even if they are independent in many ways, including monetarily, from the rest of Washington's bureaucracy). Never mind because the post office has decided that the correct punishment for choosing to rent a non-post office box is to refuse the forwarding of mail.

I used to collect stamps. I used to tell people the post office had never done anything bad to me. I used to say that thirty-two cents was a pretty reasonable price for a letter. But I used to be able to get my mail forwarded, too.

Matt Worley has promised to friends and family that he'll stop whining about this forwarding thing during drunken rages at the Fat Chance Bar & Grill. Oh yeah, the correct address for Lies is: 1112 San Pedro NE #154, Albuquerque, NM 87110. Pass it on.

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