Postal woes
Did I ever mention what a complete nightmare mail-forwarding has been for us? No? To put it simply, it's been a complete nightmare.
We set up temporary mail-forwarding as of the date Henry and I moved to MA last summer because I'm the one who handles all the bills. Since we were using the service for a finite amount of time, the local Post Office was holding all of the mail they couldn't forward, which I didn't even know they were doing and probably never would have known if I hadn't bumped into our mailman who said "You have a ton of mail waiting for you at the p.o." I don't know what I thought would happen with the mail that couldn't be forwarded, maybe I thought it would get returned to the sender? Or maybe I thought it would just magically dissappear off the face of the earth? To confuse matters even more, it was unclear what could or couldn't be forwarded. Twice I got magazines that I subscribe to forwarded to Salem (I received one issue of Better Homes and Gardens which was a bummer because I don't even like the magazine, and one issue of American Bungalow, the best magazine in the whole wide world.). Naturally, when Dave and I would come back to town for our quick visits, we'd go to the post office expecting a pile of magazines that couldn't be forwarded, and yet there never were any. Where did they go? We got tons of LL Bean catalogs and March of Dimes solicitations, but never any of our magazines. Apparently, they did magically disappear off the face of the earth.
The second thing that happened was I ordered something from Amazon soon after we moved up to Salem but forgot to update our address so it was sent to our house here in PA. I didn't realize what I'd done until a few weeks had gone by. I looked at the online delivery confirmation and it said it had been sent, scanned at our local facility at 8:43AM, then had attempted delivery taking place at "12:00AM, recipient not home." When I inquired after the package on our next trip home a couple of weeks later, you wouldn't believe the runaround I got. I waited for about ten minutes while they looked into it, during which time one of the employees came out twice, ostensibly to shuffle random papers, but looking at me intently while he did it, only to return to the back after a few seconds. Finally, when he came back out the third time to tell me he had no idea what I was talking about, he did it with an entourage of three other postal employees, there to, I don't know, back him up in case I got violent? He basically insisted that I was making the whole thing up because why would they attempt delivery at 12AM? I said I also thought it was odd, but there it was. Then he said he couldn't do anything for me, despite what the delivery log said. They acted the whole time like I had come in accusing someone of stealing the package. When I first went in I figured it was just shoved in some corner until I came in to get it. By the time I left I was almost convinced someone had taken it because they were such jerks about it. I asked the company who sent it to look into it and the USPS told them it was either lost or stolen. Yeah.
Anyway, what opened up this can of worms was knowing what a mess it would be when we had to start mail-forwarding in Salem. When I filled out the form I thought about all of the mail that would have already been forwarded from home that would hit Salem only to be forwarded back. Mail will probably still be trickling in years from now. I just called a bunch of utilities whose bills I haven't received yet and sure enough five of them are due in the next few days. If I'd have been smart I'd have stopped mail-forwarding here a week before leaving, then just put a hold on it until we got back. Hind-sight and 20-20 and all of that.