Going Postal

I got an email from my parents this morning asking if I got the check they sent me. My first reaction: "What check?"

My second reaction: "Come to think of it, I haven't received ANY mail for the past two weeks!"

I called the post office and managed to get our actual mail carrier on the phone. It turns out that while they did process my recent request to forward mail addressed to our apartment to our home address, they never got around to canceling our order to forward mail addressed to our home address to our apartment -- despite the fact that I submitted the cancellation request form in person three weeks ago. So our mail ended up in some kind of postal purgatory where it kept getting forwarded back and forth but never actually delivered.

What makes this even more ridiculous is that both our house and our apartment are in the same ZIP code and serviced by the same post office, so our mail never even left the building, it just kept getting shuffled back and forth from one carrier's box to another. Thankfully, I was able to get this straightened out over the phone, and our mailman showed up a few hours later with a big bundle of mail -- including the check -- and a package that my friend Kinnari had shipped to herself here. It arrived just in the nick of time, as they left about an hour later. Fingers crossed that we will be receiving regular mail delivery from now on...

In other package-delivery news, yesterday was my sister's birthday. In the midst of packing and moving, I managed to pull up her Amazon.com wish list and order a couple books for her. The total came to something like $24.42, so I was just shy of the $25 required to qualify for free shipping. I did a quick search to see if I could find something for less than a dollar to add to the order, and settled on a glue stick for 96 cents. She's crafty, so I figured it would come in handy for some project or another -- and since we both come from a long line of frugal penny-pinchers, I knew she'd appreciate the reason why I included it.

Well, a few days later I got an email from Amazon.com informing me that they had shipped part of my order separately for quicker service. My subsequent email exchange with Sonia went thusly:

July 27
Naina: You should be getting a couple packages from Amazon in the mail -- one of which will seem completely ridiculous (because it is!).

July 31
Sonia: I just received a box from Amazon containing a single glue stick. I imagine this is the ridiculous part? :)

The books were delivered to her office yesterday, but since she took the day off, the only birthday gift she's received from me so far is a glue stick -- most likely in a way-too-large box with unwarranted amounts of air cushioning. I'm definitely going to have to make up for this at Christmas...