dead letter office

i’ve learned some new postal system vocabulary as of late…

…if your parcel falls into the “moving through network” status in the USPS app, don’t look for it anytime soon. for example:

as you can see, it’s been stuck in that status for a month and some change now as of today. i dare say it’s gone for good. i REALLY regret only dropping six bucks and some change on postage for this thing – if i’d done a whole ten bucks i could have added $100 in insurance and i could be raking in some dough right now, but i got stupid and went the slightly less expensive route to i could just see. what i SHOULD have seen what the postal service having to put their money where their mouth was, as it were.

lemme offer some back story, although i might have covered part of this already…

so, i used to have to run errands for my uncle and it included a run to “his post office”, which was on the UT campus, as it had been since the 1960’s. but back in january we were informed said post office was closing, so we filled out the change of address form. he later received a letter AT THE ADDRESS HE’D FORWARDED HIS MAIL TO stating that the paperwork wasn’t done right (even though the clerk at the post office looked over everything i did, said “PERFECTION!”, and stamped it all right in front of me) and so he RE-filled out the paperwork and dropped it at a second post office, who also told him it was done right.

but no mail has been forwarded. and it’s been over six weeks since the SECOND form was turned in.

so i decided to try an experiment, and printed the phrase “I’M JUST SENDING THIS TO TEST THE POSTAL SYSTEM” in block caps on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and mailed it. where i fucked up was a paid the extra to be able to track it, but did NOT pay the extra to INSURE it. this was back at the beginning of february, as you can see, and less than two weeks later, it vanishes off the face of the earth never to be heard from again…

so now what do we do? i mean, i know sometimes snail mail is gonna snail, but daaaaaaammmn…