WWTBAM Bored

I hardly ever mail things from my roadside mailbox where I get my mail. I prefer to drop them in the Blue Boxes. Last week, I mailed a bunch from blue boxes.

Today, there was a small brown envelope from the post office with a request for 49 cents. Apparently, my envelope to Brownie's had my address sticker, but no stamp.

Obviously, they put a stamp on it and sent it on its merry way. This type of thing used to happen a lot, but it is getting rarer here. Other local post offices probably would not have done it.

My all-time favorite post office story is from circa 2003. We got a graduation thank you note that said:

David and Lori
Anytown, MN

No last name and no address beyond the town and we still got the card.

Maybe that's a common occurrence in post offices up north, but it certainly has never happened to me. Back when I was in college, I sent some postcards to GAMES World of Puzzles magazine to submit answers to one of their challenging puzzle contests. I had a box of pre-paid postcards... but what I didn't know was that the postage rate for postcards around that time had increased from 20 cents to 21 cents. The post office returned every one of those postcards to my house... over one frickin' penny.

Spock wrote: My all-time favorite post office story is from circa 2003. We got a graduation thank you note that said:

David and Lori
Anytown, MN

No last name and no address beyond the town and we still got the card.

That's nothing. We get mail that's simply addressed to "Occupant" all the time. I can't get over how the Post Office knows we live here.

silverscreenselect wrote:

Spock wrote: My all-time favorite post office story is from circa 2003. We got a graduation thank you note that said:

David and Lori
Anytown, MN

No last name and no address beyond the town and we still got the card.

That's nothing. We get mail that's simply addressed to "Occupant" all the time. I can't get over how the Post Office knows we live here.

Hey, I still get mail for dead people.

Spock wrote:
My all-time favorite post office story is from circa 2003. We got a graduation thank you note that said:

David and Lori
Anytown, MN

No last name and no address beyond the town and we still got the card.

The comic strip "Garfield" is based just down the road from my parents' farm (my grandparents lived in the area a little farther away before they passed away) in rural Albany, IN. Although I think the Paws, Inc address is actually Muncie since Albany doesn't have a post office. My grandmother grew up near Jim Davis' family in Fairmount, IN but she moved away before he was born so she knew his family but not him. Back in the late 70s when Garfield was first in the newspaper my grandmother really loved the comic strip and would cut it out to send it to relatives who didn't get it yet.

After a while she sent Jim Davis a letter asking if he could please get the strip in more papers. We tried to explain how syndication worked but she thought it was worth a try. And she was a big letter writer. She signed the letter Granny Goodwitch, Farmland, IN. That was it. No actual name or anything else. Of course, their farm wasn't actually in Farmland. That was several miles away but has a post office. Granny Goodwitch was the name she used when she would make treats to donate to the local schools while her 5 children and bunches of grandchildren attended spread out over many, many years.

Jim Davis wrote a letter back thanking her with the letter addressed: Granny Goodwitch, Farmland, IN. He said he would do what he could. The letter showed up in my grandparents mailbox with just that address, no questions asked. And for the next 25 years until she died she got a copy of every Garfield compilation book that came out always addressed the same way.

Small town post offices are great.

In 1985, when I was getting ready to send out invitations for my college graduation, I decided to use my Macintosh computer and dot-matrix printer to print addresses on the envelopes in their Old English font called London:



It was a big pain, but I thought my relatives would get a kick out of it. I was right, but one of my aunts heard about these special invitations and was miffed that she hadn't received one. It turned out that her invitation had made it as far as her small-town post office, but they were so impressed with it that they kept it for a few days to show around before delivering it!