Thursday, August 09, 2007

Trials and tribulations in our nation's post offices

Scott and I are shipping most of our items on Amtrak, but we have several boxes that we wanted to ship via USPS media mail. Abby kindly lent us her car on Wednesday morning, and chaos ensued:

We loaded up the car with all of our boxes and hit the road at 8 am. We headed south on Georgia to the Howard University post office, since it opened at 8 - nice and early, so I could get to work at a decent hour.

We couldn't find it. We asked three people and circled the block four times and finally determined that it was in the basement of an administrative building. Not wanting to haul our boxes through a maze, we decided to go to the Upshur St. post office, which would be open by the time we arrived.

We couldn't find it. We went home, regrouped, checked addresses and opening times, and set off once again.

We found the Upshur St. office and happily (well, it was super hot and muggy, and Scott had a killer headache, but anyways) unloaded our boxes. We decided that Scott would deal with mailing the boxes so that I could drive home and get to work. I got home to a voicemail from Scott: the Upshur St. post office only accepts packages weighing 30 pounds or less.

I drove back, and we loaded all the boxes into the car again. We drove north on Georgia and found a third post office. We determined that they would accept our boxes, although for some reason we couldn't address them in the (air-conditioned) post office. We unloaded our boxes onto the sidewalk, valiantly battled gusts of hot wind to label them. I nervously left Scott to finish up so that I could go to work. Around 11 am, I got a text message letting me know that everything was mailed. Such a feeling of accomplishment for such a menial task!

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