I don’t deal with many paper bills anymore, and even then I usually pay online instead of writing a check if it’s at all recurring…but most of the ones I do get would love to switch me over to electronic billing. It cuts out that pesky paper phase in between the electronic issuing and electronic processing, and of course if you set up auto-pay with a credit card, they don’t have to worry about late (or missing) payments from you anymore.

But this bumper sticker shows that there are some people who would really rather you paid your bills by mail. I wonder why…

Postal truck with bumper sticker: Pay Your Bills By Mail!

I’ve lost some confidence in USPS’s delivery confirmation service.

Even though we put mail delivery on hold while we were on vacation, USPS claims that delivered a package at 4:08pm on Saturday.

So, either they didn’t honor the mail hold and delivered it…in which case who knows where it is now…or they did honor the mail hold and falsely marked the package as having been delivered…in which case who knows where it is now.

At least it wasn’t anything important.

My suspicion is that it was “delivered” to the local post office, and that they haven’t sent us the accumulated mail like they were supposed to. Which means now I need to figure out which office handles our incoming mail and get there during business hours.

Update:

That package I mentioned finally showed up — three days after the end of the vacation hold and five days after delivery confirmation tracking claimed it had been delivered.

So now I know that delivery confirmation doesn’t actually confirm delivery. I wonder what it does confirm.

A few weeks ago, I stopped at the post office on the way to work. As I walked to the door, my eye was immediately drawn to the big hole in the wall where, apparently, a car had crashed into the building while trying to park.

Whatever vehicle had done the damage was long gone, and the area around was cordoned off with yellow caution tape. Since I like to take pictures of weird stuff, I snapped a photo with my cell phone. (No, I didn’t cross the tape; it’s just not visible in the frame.)

This morning, I stopped at the same post office again. This time, my eye was drawn to a new addition to the facility:

One of these bright yellow posts stood in front of each parking space along the building. You can still see where the concrete has been spread around the base, and absolutely no paint has worn off. Clearly someone decided not to take any more chances with wayward cars!