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I did recently have a less-than-stellar experience before the Christmas season, and I'll throw it in the mix here just to be "fair and balanced."

To expedite and insure a payment, I used one of the United States Postal Service’s Priority Mail 2-day delivery letter options. This is not to be confused with Priority Mail parcels, which generally arrive within at least spitting distance of on time and/or in good shape. No, this was a nominally standard letter-sized envelope variant with the nice, transparent window, and it ended up providing me with hours – actually, days – of instruction. Imagine my surprise at finding the trail of the letter going cold after one day. Imagine my greater surprise at seeing no additional progress until five days later. Imagine my incalculable surprise when, nine days after mailing, this 2-day letter was still in limbo.

The experience would have been both instructional AND entertaining were it not for the fact that payment for a retail item was inside that envelope, and an innocent businessman was sitting on a piece of merchandise that had been reserved – yet still not paid for - despite my attempt at a punctual payment. As it is, there was only the instructional component, and it was only on my part. Aside from gratitude for this education in how things (don’t) move from place to place, about the only benefit I derived was a state of suspense insofar as I began to wonder if the bloody thing would ever arrive.

Five days strikes me as a possibly – just possibly, mind you - excessive amount of time for an extra-cost, boldly lettered and barcoded, “get-the-hell-out-of-the-way-because-I’m-special” letter to travel from Cedar Rapids, IA to Bellmawr, NJ. This is 2013 AD. Do I think that some stagecoach carrying the mail has been hampered by bottomless mud on the old National Road, or suffered a busted axle skein in the Cumberland Gap? Did a side-wheel steam packet with a postal contract get cut down by floating ice on the Upper Mississippi? Should I worry about the viability of an open-cockpit biplane flown without navigational aids by a half-frozen airmail pilot somewhere over Pennsylvania? Five days betwixt Eastern Iowa and SW New Jersey… that’s a generous allowance even if some functionary in the post office at Cedar Rapids had gone berserk and routed eastbound mail via the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, which mistakenly dumped the RPO contents onto the platform at Elmira, resulting in a leisurely and teetering trip in the Tipton-Bennett-Stockton mixed train. I suspect that none of these things occurred.

As for as a two day journey from Bellmawr, NJ to Brooklyn, NY, that pace might be logically explained by the employment of six individual letter carriers on bicycles riding in a relay at a steady – albeit not excessive – pace, allowing adequate stops for food and miscellaneous health exigencies. Perhaps a contract carrier acted out of an understandable sense of self-preservation and deliberately avoided driving directly through any “bad” areas of New Jersey between Bellmawr and the Hudson River; this would be a sinuous route indeed, and realistically such an anabasis would expand to fill up at least a fortnight, so that proposal has no credibility. More within the realm of possibility would be the theory that the driver simply decided to go from Bellmawr to Brooklyn via Gainesville or Daytona Beach.

I’m dubious about the more than 48 hours it apparently takes for a letter to go from the Brooklyn, NY postal sorting facilities to a post office in southern Westchester County, but then, I am not familiar with the greater NYC area. Conceding that “they do things different in the Big Apple” and that surface streets leading to southern Westchester County may well be the driving equivalent of climbing the north face of the Eiger, I made informal inquiries among my confidantes and was told that (in no particular order of importance):

A. USPS labor contracts with various unions specifically state that mail cannot be transported across the East River more than once during months whose names contain the letter “R.”

B. Letters from Iowa are kept at the USPS Brooklyn Sort Facility until everyone on the property has gotten a chance to make fun of the hick-sounding names on the return address labels. Outstandingly amusing specimens of Podunk-itude are displayed in the employee dining area until all shifts have shared in the hilarity.

C. There is actually no such thing as the USPS Brooklyn Sort Facility, and all mail supposedly “sorted” there is merely automatically routed to Cedar Rapids, IA via Bellmawr, NJ and back again. Once caught in this loop, the letter is doomed to stay in the system for eternity, thus the ever-increasing number of postal semi-trailers one encounters on Interstate 80.

D. Adequate space is often not available in any NYC-area USPS or USPS contractor’s vehicles to deal with the extraordinary burden of a (roughly) 9” x 12” envelope having the colossal thickness of six sheets of common typing paper. Such monstrously bulky and heavy items are left behind until there is sufficient empty space for them in a subsequent run, which generally occurs during the third week of February, leap years inclusive.

E. It’s George W. Bush’s fault.

Aside from “D” and “E,” these are all, of course, ludicrous fables offered by jokers at my expense… except possibly “B”… and – on reflection - maybe “C.” I am firmly convinced that “A” is absolutely an out-and-out falsehood.

Despite all the angst, the letter did arrive ten days later, so maybe paying 1,217% more than a regular first class stamp to enable a letter to enter a holding pattern of the damned in a Priority Mail purgatory is not necessarily foolish. After all, I have learned to not only track a letter, but also how to get automatic updates sent right to my e-mail account; the icing on that particular cake is that I can now navigate the USPS’ automated on-line complaint/issues menu. I also discovered that 2-day service is not actually guaranteed, but only implied… and that alone has to be worth something. Of slightly lesser value is the knowledge that using USPS Priority Mail 2-day letter service is something akin to traveling to Mexico and then ordering a Corona: to wit, the natives will happily take your money and then ridicule your choice once you are out of earshot.

This adventure in letter sending was of minor personal benefit as it took me back in time to a postal problem I heard of when I was a little boy: near the end of WWII, a late uncle reportedly helped another wounded soldier in a hospital to disassemble a captured German motorcycle – less reliable relatives add a sidecar - and mail the pieces separately from France to the US. Family tradition told me that the motorcycle never arrived. I now believe it is possible that the Motorrad des Krieges might actually still be still on its way, but has been delayed and is in transit somewhere in the vicinity of Bellmawr, New Jersey. Somewhat like "Schrödinger’s Cat," it hasn’t really been delivered, yet it isn’t really lost.

(Had Erwin Schrödinger sent something via Priority Mail 2-day letter from Vienna, Austria to Oxford Junction, Iowa, quantum mechanics students might now be studying the paradox of “Schrödinger’s Letter.”)

My recommendations to anyone who will listen is that if they want a letter in a standard sized envelope to arrive in a timely fashion, just put a first class stamp on the thing and be done with it. If it absolutely has to be gussied up, then at least use one of the greatly oversized USPS envelopes/mailers… or fold it in half and shove it into a small flat rate box… or deliver it yourself.

"The bugs," as they say, "have not been worked out."

Mr. niteowl77