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Two weeks before Christmas, I finished lovingly packaging up our adult children’s gifts, as well as some for Brian’s elderly mother. I always use beautiful ribbons with extra glitter (because it’s so annoying when people are unwrapping their gifts). Heh…

The post office had shipping deadlines posted on their website and we shipped our packages long before those dates.

I packaged up four large boxes, put the address labels on the inside and the outside, and had Brian take them to get shipped. That was on a Monday, We paid extra for expediting shipping, and extra for insurance. Everything was supposed to be delivered by that Friday.

After nine days, I finally got up an update from the post office’s tracking app. ALL of the packages were supposed to be heading south but the nearest large hub is in Memphis. I panicked, and bought our son (who would be spending his first Christmas without us) and Brian’s mother some extra gifts, and had them wrapped and shipped by Amazon. Those arrived quickly.

The packages did eventually arrive at their destinations, and before Christmas, but the stress caused by the USPS was unacceptable. We found out (because Brian went down to our post office when the tracking didn’t update for days) that they had 20 people come in complaining that week (it’s a very small town). Why didn’t the clerk tell Brian that when he dropped off the boxes?! He would have taken them to UPS instead!

I will never use the post office to ship packages again. And, just today, I saw this:

US Postal Service faces huge threat as mail workers steal millions and are targeted by criminal rings

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