El Correo

Those ads with the Post Office begging and pleading that we send more mail? Perhaps people would send more mail if they didn't have to deal with your bureaucracy and your blatant attempt to force people to pay you for services that used to be free.

Case in point: changing your address.

It used to be that those cards to change your address were everywhere at the post office. Easily accessible, easily filled out, dropped in the mail, forwarding done. Now it's hard to find the cards. We went to the main post office and first they told us you could only do it online. But changing your address online means paying them $1! When we noted that, they "found" a few cards for us to fill out and we thought we were done.

Not so fast.

Apparently, despite my not very sloppy handwriting, they interpreted an S to be an 8. Really, are there a lot of apartment buildings with more than 80 floors in Manhattan? Do you use your brain?

I called them today and mentioned their mistake. Their only solution? Cancel the previous request and put in a new one. And if you do it over the phone or online, that'll be $1, please.

Are you kidding me?

You messed up my mail forwarding and you want me to pay you? If I had paid you the first time, you would make me pay you twice? For your own incompetence? (And by "your", I don't mean the nice lady on the phone, I mean the USPS in general.)

Neither of us has received any forwarded mail. I know it takes some time but now we're out of that window period and we should be getting forwarded mail, not mail at the old address and people telling us their mail got returned. There are still so many other places where I need to change my address as a general matter (so much to do, so overwhelmed!) that this hassle is really something I was hoping we would not have to deal with. Now we're at the point where the forwarding may not start until after we no longer have access to our old mailbox. Fantastic.

Off to the Post Office over lunch (exactly how I wanted to spend lunchtime) to see if I can find another one of those stupid cards and to see if this time they realize that I don't live on the 83rd floor. If they mess it up again, I'm not sure what to do.