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cimoreneThey're not actually new. Those are how postboxes are always set up in rural areas, like farms. But we are only a rural area in the sense that our town is small. We literally live one block behind the town hall, police station, and postal sorting center. They're now grouping mailboxes in the entire town, because the postal service was privatized decades ago, and it isn't making money, because it isn't profitable to run a postal service (duh).
I've written about our problems with the postal service in the past, starting when they closed almost all the branch offices which are the bases for delivery routes and outsourced the local post office services to mostly supermarkets and convenience stores, and predictably, their reliability plummeted. We started having packages and package slips arrive late or never at our last flat in Turku, where the delivery was particularly bad. We had a few package slips go astray after moving to Pargas, but you can now register to get them electronically instead.
Well, when they first started planning this we got a form letter in the mail, along with the rest of the town, saying they were going to mark the spot where our mailbox has to be moved to and that it would be within a certain distance, but as far as I remember it, there was something about this not applying to everybody, so when we looked around the edges of the street and didn't see any markers, we figured they didn't want to move ours. Our tenants in the other half of the house also have a mailbox next to ours, so we thought maybe they were already counting that.
Except then last week the last in the long line of form letters was like, "We see that you still haven't moved your mailbox to the marked place. If you don't want to pay extra for a personal mailbox, and you don't have proof of a physical disability or being too old to walk to the mailbox, you will stop getting mail next Monday (that was yesterday)."
So we were like, "WHAT? HELP? WHAT MARKER?" The letter didn't have any number to call for questions or anything, by the way. It just acted like everybody OBVIOUSLY knew where the marker was. It took me half an hour on the website to find the customer service contact link, and that wasn't an anomaly, because I had to find it again yesterday and it took even longer that time. So I left a call request with my question ("Uh, where?") and the local chief called me up and was very nice and told me where it was and that the other two neighbors on our block will have theirs there too.
Friday Wax had to work late, and we hate talking to people, so we did not talk to the neighbors yet. It took us half the day Saturday to get around to it and it was past sunset when we went to the new next door neighbors' door. They moved in a couple months ago and are not done renovating. I've talked repeatedly about bringing them a welcome gift of baked goods but we haven't got around to it because of The Horrors and also we're very ADHD. Anyway, we talked to them about it and we learned that they have been getting the form letters as well, but they thought they didn't apply to them because just like two months ago when they moved in they had to call that guy about their mailbox, because the former owners had it in the wrong place, and he was like "Oh, just anywhere is fine", and so they pardonably thought that anywhere was fine. But their address was written on the marker with ours, so they had even shorter notice than we did. The last neighbor is the construction guy across the street who has been gradually removing all the nasty asbestos from his house siding and replacing it with beautiful wood by himself, and he's so far done two sides of the house in two years. Permanent scaffolding. He knows how to build stuff, but they were out of town Saturday night so we had to go home.
But Sunday when we looked out the window we saw the new neighbor and an old guy, presumably dad to one of the owners, had already built a wooden stand at the marker, which is on our property a couple of meters away from the driveway that leads to the garage under the tenants' half of the building, right outside our diningroom window. It was raining, but he finished the whole thing before sundown Sunday, which is not only impressive but kind of scary to our ADHD brains. But anyway, we managed to catch the other neighbor as they arrived back home and point it out to them, and both the neighbors got their mailboxes in place Sunday night. We took ours down from the old stand and brought them over there, but by the time we got back from the store with the right size of wood screws it was raining and dark, so we left them there on the ground overnight, and Wax got up half an hour early before her late shift so we could do it yesterday morning.
We also positioned them wrong and so we're going to have to get some plastic washers and take them down and put those in and then put them back, but they're on there now anyway.
Okay, the thing is though, that since we live on the corner, our house is on two streets and it has two addresses, which I will call Main Street 300 and Cross Street 302 A. Our registered address is Main Street 300 and our mailbox has always been on Main Street, but the new location is on Cross Street. The peculiar thing is that our new neighbors, next door in a different house, are Cross Street 302 B and we are Cross Street 302 A, even though A and B are usually used for two different doors in the same building or at least the same complex - apparently the town planning had the two lots as one lot sometime uh, before 1950. Anyway, our mailboxes (ours and the tenants') both say 300 on them (they don't say Main Street because there's a street sign on the corner of the house, visible when standing at the mailbox). But we have repeatedly had people knocking at our door trying to pick up taxi fares or sell products to people living in the apartment block which has the address Cross Street 300, because they see the 300 on our house. So now our mailboxes are on Cross Street, saying 300, I'm a little worried... maybe I need to replace the address stickers again so that they now say Main Street 300 instead of just 300. They are mounted between the neighbors' at Cross Street 302 B and Cross Street 299. I sent another call request to ask the guy if we needed to change the mailbox stickers and he says no, it's fine from the post office's point of view.
I've written about our problems with the postal service in the past, starting when they closed almost all the branch offices which are the bases for delivery routes and outsourced the local post office services to mostly supermarkets and convenience stores, and predictably, their reliability plummeted. We started having packages and package slips arrive late or never at our last flat in Turku, where the delivery was particularly bad. We had a few package slips go astray after moving to Pargas, but you can now register to get them electronically instead.
Well, when they first started planning this we got a form letter in the mail, along with the rest of the town, saying they were going to mark the spot where our mailbox has to be moved to and that it would be within a certain distance, but as far as I remember it, there was something about this not applying to everybody, so when we looked around the edges of the street and didn't see any markers, we figured they didn't want to move ours. Our tenants in the other half of the house also have a mailbox next to ours, so we thought maybe they were already counting that.
Except then last week the last in the long line of form letters was like, "We see that you still haven't moved your mailbox to the marked place. If you don't want to pay extra for a personal mailbox, and you don't have proof of a physical disability or being too old to walk to the mailbox, you will stop getting mail next Monday (that was yesterday)."
So we were like, "WHAT? HELP? WHAT MARKER?" The letter didn't have any number to call for questions or anything, by the way. It just acted like everybody OBVIOUSLY knew where the marker was. It took me half an hour on the website to find the customer service contact link, and that wasn't an anomaly, because I had to find it again yesterday and it took even longer that time. So I left a call request with my question ("Uh, where?") and the local chief called me up and was very nice and told me where it was and that the other two neighbors on our block will have theirs there too.
Friday Wax had to work late, and we hate talking to people, so we did not talk to the neighbors yet. It took us half the day Saturday to get around to it and it was past sunset when we went to the new next door neighbors' door. They moved in a couple months ago and are not done renovating. I've talked repeatedly about bringing them a welcome gift of baked goods but we haven't got around to it because of The Horrors and also we're very ADHD. Anyway, we talked to them about it and we learned that they have been getting the form letters as well, but they thought they didn't apply to them because just like two months ago when they moved in they had to call that guy about their mailbox, because the former owners had it in the wrong place, and he was like "Oh, just anywhere is fine", and so they pardonably thought that anywhere was fine. But their address was written on the marker with ours, so they had even shorter notice than we did. The last neighbor is the construction guy across the street who has been gradually removing all the nasty asbestos from his house siding and replacing it with beautiful wood by himself, and he's so far done two sides of the house in two years. Permanent scaffolding. He knows how to build stuff, but they were out of town Saturday night so we had to go home.
But Sunday when we looked out the window we saw the new neighbor and an old guy, presumably dad to one of the owners, had already built a wooden stand at the marker, which is on our property a couple of meters away from the driveway that leads to the garage under the tenants' half of the building, right outside our diningroom window. It was raining, but he finished the whole thing before sundown Sunday, which is not only impressive but kind of scary to our ADHD brains. But anyway, we managed to catch the other neighbor as they arrived back home and point it out to them, and both the neighbors got their mailboxes in place Sunday night. We took ours down from the old stand and brought them over there, but by the time we got back from the store with the right size of wood screws it was raining and dark, so we left them there on the ground overnight, and Wax got up half an hour early before her late shift so we could do it yesterday morning.
We also positioned them wrong and so we're going to have to get some plastic washers and take them down and put those in and then put them back, but they're on there now anyway.
Okay, the thing is though, that since we live on the corner, our house is on two streets and it has two addresses, which I will call Main Street 300 and Cross Street 302 A. Our registered address is Main Street 300 and our mailbox has always been on Main Street, but the new location is on Cross Street. The peculiar thing is that our new neighbors, next door in a different house, are Cross Street 302 B and we are Cross Street 302 A, even though A and B are usually used for two different doors in the same building or at least the same complex - apparently the town planning had the two lots as one lot sometime uh, before 1950. Anyway, our mailboxes (ours and the tenants') both say 300 on them (they don't say Main Street because there's a street sign on the corner of the house, visible when standing at the mailbox). But we have repeatedly had people knocking at our door trying to pick up taxi fares or sell products to people living in the apartment block which has the address Cross Street 300, because they see the 300 on our house. So now our mailboxes are on Cross Street, saying 300, I'm a little worried... maybe I need to replace the address stickers again so that they now say Main Street 300 instead of just 300. They are mounted between the neighbors' at Cross Street 302 B and Cross Street 299. I sent another call request to ask the guy if we needed to change the mailbox stickers and he says no, it's fine from the post office's point of view.
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Date: 5 Nov 2024 10:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 5 Nov 2024 04:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 5 Nov 2024 11:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 5 Nov 2024 04:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 5 Nov 2024 06:56 pm (UTC)I've been shocked at how good the mail/home delivery is here in Seattle--it's really spoiling me I fear!
Amazon is often 2-4 hours. The style of house we (and most of the neighbours) have has a front porch for parcel delivery. We installed a big front porch bench with a lift up lid so they can toss the parcels inside to be safe from casual thieves.
We even have an insulated porch box for organic small grocery delivery. So nice to have weekly eggs (we go through a ton of eggs), and it's on Friday so I can always add some nice extra things into the delivery for Saturday breakfast/brunch or weekend baking projects.
(no subject)
Date: 6 Nov 2024 01:20 pm (UTC)Package delivery overall is very good in Finland, like banking - the other carriers more so than the postal service, but they are better now that they have a good network of parcel lockers everywhere. Online banking is very secure and there are online payment processors that don't seem to operate outside the Nordic countries as far as I know but which process by directly confirming identity with the bank. It's so much more secure and convenient to order from Finnish stores that I make a real effort to find things domestically (it works for art supplies and knitting, not for fountain pen stuff. After Brexit I spent a long time finding EU shops for those outside of the UK). I am fairly sure our porch is safe here, and we almost never lock our door, but I still prefer picking up parcels for security.
One of our two Finnish supermarket chains has got a troop of grocery delivery robots, which are fun to spot around town. We haven't used them yet though. We usually buy more things at a time than would fit in them.