Neither sleet nor snow....

Unlike most people, I am in awe of our postal service. I do recall sitting at work, also in a government building, when the term "postal" was about to be created. The first postal incident happened about five minutes from my old office. All we heard at first was that there was mass shooting and killing at a government building near us. It was not a good time.

But I digress. Our post office is a government institution, after all. Many people consider government workers to be retired the day they are hired. I will admit that some people who are public employees don't feel much of a need to work hard. However, that is luckily not the norm. Our postal employees go out every day in snow, sleet, ice, extreme heat, dark, wind, and anything else Mother Nature shakes her dice and rolls at us on a daily basis. They work under time constraints. They deal with suspicious looking packages, ineptly wrapped items, illegible addresses, smelly boxes, and just plain odd items. They have to sort them and send them all over the world as fast as possible.

I find this process impressive. We have what, 300 million people in this country now? Add to that volume the gift the USPS gives to businesses of being allowed to send extreme volumes of mail at a reduced amount of postage and they handle a huge amount of mail on a daily basis.

I spent an afternoon that I didn't have available recently to dig up and find all the papers and pamphlets I have here for a friend in another state who has a seriously injured knee and needs to lose weight in a healthy way. She has no extra funds; not even enough to join Weight Watchers online. So I dug around to find the point system booklet, a pile of weekly journals to write down what she eats, all the little weekly supplements they gave me and anything else I could find. I had duplicates of some items, but if I didn't, I gave her what I had. She needs it more than I do right now. I finally got it all into a big envelope, addressed it carefully, and took it to the UPS store nearby. They sent it regular mail, which was what I wanted.

She IMed me yesterday. She received the letter and a damaged envelope, but all the papers and pamphlets and booklets from Weight Watchers were gone. I didn't insure the package since the items are not replaceable. WW will not give me another set.

I feel really bad, but there is nothing I can do now. I do find it odd that the envelope and my letter to her got there, but every other single paper is missing.

I hope whoever has it now needs it more than my friend does.