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Health & Fitness

A Compliment for the United States Postal Service

I spend a lot of time at the post office. Here's a year-end compliment for what I consider to be the usual service by our postal service.

Thursday afternoon I stopped at the Woodbury Post Office to mail several packets of material.

I’m a familiar face there, and I mentioned to the clerk that I was going to do a blog post about the post office that evening.

“Oh oh”, she said, expecting the worst. This time of year people in the delivery business don’t expect kudos. “Bad” sells better than “good” on the media and the internet….

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She had no reason to worry.

I want relate a story about the cousin of the little guy pictured above:

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I purchased some Gingerbread men at the November 27 Minnesota Orchestra performance of Hansel and Gretel. The program, of Engelbert Humperdincks classic, was superb. (Check YouTube for many samples of Hansel and Gretel.)

The evening was in celebration of the Centennial of the Orchestra’s Young People’s Concerts, as explained in the evenings program: MN Orchestra YPSCA001. The Gingerbread men (persons?) – the dessert for the evening – were a fund raiser of/for the Young People’s Symphony Concert Association (YPSCA).

Of course we sampled the men, but there were some left over. For sure, one was saved for our friend, Annelee, who grew up in Germany. We’d see her at Christmas time and hand deliver hers. (Accomplished).

Another I decided to send to a friend in a distant state who I knew had, years ago, been a docent for the Minnesota Orchestra.

The question was, how to get the little man to a home perhaps a thousand miles away….

I decided to try the U.S. mail.

My packaging was de minimis.

I had some empty photograph boxes from the local Proex, and put Gingerbread Man in one of them, and ‘cushioned’ it with similar boxes top and bottom. I wrapped the resulting ‘box’ with plain brown paper, addressed it, and took it to the local post office. Christmas mailing season was upon us, and I stood in line. When it was my turn, I gave the clerk the box, paid the postage and left. I simply sent it ‘priority mail’. No insurance, no special handling.

I was so sure it wouldn’t arrive ‘safely’ that I took the above photo and sent it to my friend, just in case the gingerbread arrived in pieces. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

A couple of days ago came a note from far away: “The cookie was whole – no cracks or crumbles.”

Success. Thanks to the people of the United States Post Office.

Sure, in an enterprise as immense and as complicated as the Postal Service, or any other delivery service for that matter, there are occasional problems.

But as it has been for its entire history, our Post Office is one of the very best services we can hope to have.

Happy New Year! And thanks to all of you who serve the rest of us, when sometimes we aren’t at our best.

Related post, here.

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