Nowhere

On Tuesday, March 31st, I dropped off a package at the post office.

This is not a noteworthy occurrence, generally. I have an Etsy shop (Zizi Rho Designs). I make the occasional sale. I wore gloves, and I put it in the package slot, so I didn't even have to interact with anyone.

I like to "stalk" my packages. Once a day, I check the tracking to see where it's gotten to. By the next day, it has generally left the local distribution center and it's on its way to its destination.

But not this package.

For a week, every day the package showed a "not received by us" on the website.

I wasn't too worried. This happens sometimes. Some packages are nowhere in the system until they've been delivered. So, I kept waiting for the delivery.

After a week, I contacted the buyer to see if it had arrived, just in case the system never logged it. Nope.

What to do? I wondered if perhaps the package got jammed somehow in the slot at the post office. Could I call them?

The only phone number was a 1-800 number, so I wouldn't be calling the specific location. Might as well, right?

Of course they were experiencing higher than normal volume (I wonder if those lines are ever experiencing normal volume), but they would call me back when it was my turn. So, I chose that option and went on with my day.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, I looked at my phone. There was a notification...

And that's when I remembered.

On iPhones, there's a thing called "Silence Unknown Callers". If turned on, the phone will only ring if the call is coming from a number in my contacts. Otherwise, it'll immediately go into voicemail.

When I made my call to the post office, I had completely forgotten that I had that turned on.

So, I tried to call back, but I got the usual computer menu. But it was my turn! While I was calling, I got two more calls, the second one saying that they had tried, and now they weren't going to try any more. Considering at that point they had called me four times, that was totally reasonable.

Yeah, by the time I added the phone number to my contacts list, it was too late. Deep sigh.

Did I want to wait on the phone for another hour and fifteen minutes for another try? After poking around the website, I found where I could report missing mail. So, I did that.

Likely, that's all the person on the phone would have done, anyway. It's not likely that they would have called that post office to have them look in their collection bins.

That particular post office has done this to me before, that is not scanning the package in. It still made it to its final destination in a timely manner.

But the customer informed me that she's had issues with package delivery in the past. So, this might just be a perfect storm of issues.

I hope the package turns up. I don't want to have to reknit it...

I wrote this post last week. On Saturday, the 11th, the package arrived. Whew. Turns out I'm out of the colorway of the yarn that the customer ordered, and I couldn't find it online anywhere.