I do love the post office, honest, and no, I don’t want it to go out of business, and yes, I understand it’s a fantastic bargain, especially compared against delivery in almost any other nation. And it makes me feel crummy to pile onto them at this, their time of woe, but I have to share this story.

At my business, we moved our office on July 1st. We gave all of our clients plenty of notice, and lots of reminders since then, but some of them have still sent payments to our previous address. I understand why:  It’s easy to update your Address Book or other contact-management program and overlook updating your accounting system (usually, QuickBooks), which means that when you process a payment to us, it defaults to our old address.

This happened recently with a client (and they’re also friends) whose business is seven-tenths of a mile up the street from us. They mailed us a check — to our previous location — on August 26th. It arrived today with a forward sticker on it. The postmark clearly states 8/26, which means it took TWENTY DAYS to be forwarded two miles from our previous address.

By way of comparison:  the Pony Express was able to deliver mail from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 10 days. And that was on horseback.

We’ve gotten dozens of forwarded checks from clients over the past 10 weeks. Some take three days or so. Some take 10 days. This one took 20 days. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this. Here was the theory of someone else here at Counterintuity:  “Maybe the mailman dropped it behind his seat and only just now found it.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.