Greetings,
It was a momentous occasion today when the wife brought in the mail and we saw a yellow sticker on the outside of some of the pieces. For anyone who has moved and had their mail forwarded you know that sticker. It means that the US Postal System is working as it should and what's yours is now going to be your again. We were particularly excited however in that we requested that our mail be forwarded starting 35 days ago and this is the first piece of forwarded mail that we have received.
Sometime around September 10th I attempted to complete the online version of the request for mail forwarding. I have used this in the past and it worked fine so I was not concerned that I was only giving the post office 5 days notice to begin forwarding our mail. In order to do this online you have to provide a credit card and they do charge you $1 for the convenience. I paid a little more attention to the warnings listed in fine print that noted that if the forwarding form failed for any reason you would still be charged $1 (though you would be credited it later). As I mentioned, this has worked for me in the past flawlessly. This time however it was different (I am assuming you predicted this was the case).
Technically I was using a debit card but it does have a nice MasterCard logo on it and I have ran it as a credit card numerous times. We have not had a real credit card for over 2 years so the debit card was my only option. The first attempt failed but the error message was very non specific so I tried again with the same result. There was an option to print our a form that was completed with the information I had punched in and only needed a signature and to be dropped off at the 46902 post office. The wife took care of that the next day and all was well. Or so we thought.
A few weeks went by and after we got all the boxes unpacked we still had no forwarded mail. The paper we filled out said that it could take up to (2) weeks so I waited it out. We typically do not get many pieces of important mail. I do have (1) magazine subscription but I got it at a bargain price and I really do not read it. Suffice to say, I was not too worried that mail was not showing up. A few more days passed and I sent an email to the people living at our old address. They confirmed that 1) they neglected to check the mail often (it is a long trek to the mail box) and 2) we were still getting mail with our name on it that was not being forwarded. I had had enough so I called the 46902 office. They checked the system and could find no record of our ever having dropped off a mail forwarding notification form. It was possible but not likely that the Indianapolis facility (where the forwarding forms are all forwarded to) might have it and just be behind but our best bet was to visit the 75070 post office near us and try it from our end of things (a.k.a. starting over).
I mapped out where the 75070 post office was and the wife was going to visit there the next time she had business that took her in that direction. Low and behold though in a day or two we got a mail forwarding confirmation letter from the post office. It confirmed the information that we had entered on the form (the one we dropped off so long ago) and gave us a confirmation number along with a number to call if we were having mail forwarding problems. I called the next day (last Thursday, exactly 1 week ago from this blog entry) and after being on hold for 20 minutes or so (thank goodness for my headset) I spoke with a very nice lady who took down all my information (with the exception of the confirmation number that I tried to give her multiple times). We chit chatted a bit about my father (who retired as postmaster of a small post office in Indiana) and then she said someone would call me back within 2 business days.
We were out most of Saturday driving around Dallas and Plano (and watching The Smurfs at the $1 theater) and when we got back home we had a message on our answering machine. It was terrible quality but from what we could tell, our mail should be (or would be [or maybe already was]) being forwarded. That was (5) days ago and today it finally happened. We finally got some forwarded mail. The date on the mail was from (10) days ago so that means that even before I called and complained the mail forwarding was already set up. That also means that the mail did NOT forward for the first (25) days after we moved. My mom is coming for a visit during the week of Thanksgiving so I will likely not get my non forwarded mail until then. Oh well.
Jon
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