It Worked!!!

This will be a quick one, as today has a lot going on.

I just wanted to let my people know that my theory on verbalizing that something is lost results in its being found is once again proven true.

The day that my daughter was supposed to leave for Portugal (Thursday 11 September), I was notified by USPS that the passport had been received at a San Francisco postal facility. This was an overnight envelope, but it had been scanned in after 5:00 PM, so I thought it would be overnight from the following day. Since this would be over a weekend, I was also prepared for it to possibly arrive on Monday.

I was extremely relieved to see that it was not languishing on a desk or behind a file cabinet: progress was evident.

For three days, that notification did not change. There was no indication of where it was, just that it was “moving through the network.”

FOUR DAYS later (Monday 15 September), almost to the hour, there was finally an update. The envelope had arrived in a facility within an hour of my daughter’s home, and the item is “currently in transit to the destination.”

They said it should be delivered by 9:00 PM on September 18. A week after they got the overnight envelope, for which we had paid over $30 for expedited shipping. Now, I understood that when they said that it should arrive by Thursday, that meant it could also arrive Tuesday or Wednesday. It also said a signature would be required, so my daughter resolved to sit at home for potentially the next three days waiting for this delivery.

Yesterday (Tuesday 16 September), I received a text from her that the passport was left in the mailbox. No one even came to the door. Arrggghhh!!!!! At least it arrived. I am now (somewhat) at peace.

But USPS: come on, do better.

Don’t use USPS. It’s a disaster. If it’s important that something arrives on time and that you know approximately where your item is along the way, go with FedEx or UPS or DHL or whatever other shipping business that actually runs like a business. USPS, if you can’t handle overnight service, DON’T OFFER IT.

Looking forward to having my daughter here in five days. She will have missed three days of language class. Almost two weeks of her visa will be wasted, which is not insignificant when every single day matters for this kind of thing. But I’ll take the win. At least the passport wasn’t mangled or stolen.