It came to my attention last week that properly addressed mail was being returned to sender, even though our home certainly exists, and there is mailbox on the main street for us. After knocking some heads at the post office, I was assured by a "supervisor" that we would now get our mail, EVEN if they had a sub mail carrier that day.

And so another week goes by, and we have received mail exactly once. The forward from our home in California was filed a bit late, so I was willing to let that go for a while. But it had been three weeks since I filed the change of address order for my business P.O. box, and I had no confirmation, nothing. And certainly no mail.

Apparently this was not causing me enough angst, because I made the monumental mistake of calling 800-ASK-USPS. Don't ever, ever, ever do that. Trust me on this one. When I finally got though to a person, and explained the situation 3 or 4 times, I found out that my business mail was being forwarded alright...to the wrong address. Not N. 180th St, 98133, but NE 180th St, 98155. That's what their database defaults to. And she claims they can't change it.

Never mind that's not what I wrote on the COA card. When I asked her what I could do, she told me to "go to city hall and make them give you an address."

WTF?

She repeated that the post office could not help me with this. It wasn't their problem that they could not forward mail to my new address.

I asked to talk to her supervisor, and she told me that would be pointless, as the supervisor was the one who told her to tell me go to city hall. She finally put me through after a few minutes, and I got as far as one half of a sentence before I was suddenly disconnected.

I'm sure it was an accident. The postal service is full of highly competent, knowledgeable folks, and i'm sure only their best and brightest are answering customer service calls at 8pm Eastern time.

I'm completely open to suggestions at this point. I'm pretty speechless at the stupidity of it all...and here I thought I had to be called by a telemarketer to engage in such a completely ridiculous conversation.