Blogmas Day 5: Canada Post

Sometimes bureaucracies get so big they topple over and crush the little people below… Canada Post comes to mind.

I bought a gift for my Mom, which was supposed to be delivered today, just to cheer her up, as she has a few health issues to contend with the moment. Well, it won’t get there on time. Why? See the image below for the sad tale of how the package left for a three-day round-trip journey, ending up back where it started and nowhere near my Mom’s house.  And I will add that the claim that the delay is due to weather or natural disaster is bogus, I live here in Ontario, there are no current weather events or natural disasters going on, unless you call a big cow pie of misinformation a natural disaster.

In reality there is no big inconvenience due to this cockamamie trip the package went on, and the fact that it will arrive where it is supposed to go late.  Was this a stressed out employee?  An angry employee?  A careless and indifferent employee?  Who knows, the post office is mostly broke, and it doesn’t look like it is getting fixed.

tracking list from Canada Post
Tracking list for my Mom’s gift, there and back again!

I enjoyed my breakfast of Turmeric Breakfast Cookies and coffee with maple syrup and almond milk. I am looking forward to a lunch of Chili and a slice of probiotic bread. I haven’t decided what to prepare for dinner yet, sometimes I don’t decide until five minutes before I start to prepare it.

The day passes pleasantly when there are frequent breaks involving tasty food and beverages! Perhaps this is universally appreciated, I do know Attila and I share this propensity to enjoy our bits of culinary delights.

My nose seems to be recovering nicely, no bleeding so far, although there is still a spot of blood now and again in the right nostril, it seems to be taking longer to heal than the other nostril. No discomfort, and no bleeding, brilliant!

My gastrointestinal health is returning, so that is a relief, and my back spasms are diminishing every day, so recovery is looking good on the colonoscopy front as well.

The car goes in for servicing this evening, and Attila will use Tank to travel until it comes home from the garage. Funny old world, the bill for Tank’s repairs just arrived, the same day as the car needs to go in for routine servicing, and also the day Attila let me know that the car needs new tires. We will have to be very patient getting all these bills paid!

Worldly

Weather

0°C
Date: 12:00 PM EST Wednesday 5 December 2018
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 101.7 kPa
Tendency: Rising
Temperature: 0.2°C
Dew point: -3.7°C
Humidity: 75%
Wind: SSW 9 km/h
Visibility: 24 km

Quote

“They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.”
Dorothy Parker
1893 – 1967

Not this gal!

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Steve-Paul (SP) Simms

Glad your health is improving.
An investigation into the current state of Canada Post would make an excellent project for The Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, or some program such as The Fifth Estate. But the fact that I’m wondering whether The Fifth Estate is still on is part of the problem. And how many of us read newspapers? We are no longer a society which is defined by certain shared traditions, be it Hockey Night in Canada, Morningside, Front Page Challenge or The Tommy Hunter Show. (Well, I’m going overboard…I never watched Tommy Hunter, but you get the idea.) And the idea, which was always understood if not explicitly stated, that Canada Post had an almost sacred obligation to get your mail to you promptly, is now a joke. I still can’t figure out if my wayward mail is down to a lazy, irresponsilbe letter carrier, or (as I suspect) a practice of hoarding mail in the sorting dept. until is deemed there is enough of it to deliver. Amazon doesn’t help. It is excruciatingly hard to get answers and part of the problem is not enough people care about it. Snail mail is considered old hat.

Eileen

U.S. mail has lately been like your mail. I had a package I was waiting for and it was being bounced all over the place. It even went to one city left for another city then came back to the first city! Today and yesterday my neighbor’s packages were delivered to my house. We both have our house numbers in plain sight but I guess the delivery people can’t read!! Glad to hear that your health is improving.

Teri

Oh, great. I have a similar scan for a package I ordered for DH, except it started in Mississauga on the 4th instead of the 3rd. I got an email last night stating it may be delayed due to Canada Post and may take 1-11 days to deliver. Seriously! Mississauga is a 1 hour drive from here!!!

Glad to hear things are looking up, especially on the nose issue. It’ll probably take a while for you to start believing you’re free of that scourge but one day it’ll feel like a true godsend.

meriset

I’m glad the nose bleeds are mostly gone! Mail here is crazy, too. I don’t think they hired extra help for the holidays, so mail can arrive as late as 8pm. …Joan

Teri

Well, I have no idea where my package is. It’s listed as starting out in Mississauga but later entries just say it’s in Canada. It says it may be delayed due to work disruption. I figure that means that it’s sitting in a trailer truck somewhere, waiting for the postal service to catch up on its backlog.

US mail is different from Canadian mail. US mail delivers 6 days a week (this man’s Sunday deliveries being an exception). Canadian mail only delivers 5 days per week, with the exception of Amazon packages at Christmastime. Then they can deliver the Amazon packages on Saturdays and Sundays, too.

While I feel sorry for the guy in the video, I think much of what he went through is mostly due to the people managing that city’s postal service. I do agree that probably each city will have times when they ‘stop the clock’ on a package by misrepresenting that it couldn’t be delivered but again I think it’s going to happen more in some areas than others, due to local management trying to run lean to look good.

This sort of thing is a matter of good managers versus poor managers, I don’t think it’s endemic to the entire postal system.