I really do love the Post Office and the concept of the Priority Mail  you only-pay-one-price-boxes. They are fabulous and wonderful. It doesn’t matter how much stuff you cram into a box, it all costs the same. It doesn’t matter if it’s four pounds or 40 pounds. It’s the same price.  And the discount-rate when you are sending to APO addresses is even better. For about $11 I can send a whole box of stuff for the Husband.

It’s even better when you order the Priority Mail boxes online and have them delivered to your house. With two little kids, it’s a bit of a pain for me to lug a whole bunch of boxes out of the post office, while assuring that neither of my children get mowed down in the parking lot. So the convenience factor is huge for me.

While the Post Office is to be commended, I wish I could say the same about my mail carrier. I ordered two packs of boxes. Each pack comes with 10 boxes. I ordered one pack of large boxes and one pack of medium boxes (our niece is away at college so she gets the medium size).

Now let me give you some background. We live in a new community.  We don’t have individual mailboxes at our front door. We have a “community mailbox.” Ours is across the street. It’s a large metal box with several small boxes for each residence. Our mail carrier doesn’t walk around in the standard blue U.S Postal Service uniform. She wears regular clothes and drives from box to box (at way too fast a speed) with her back hatch open on her car. She pulls up to the box, sorts the mail into the correct boxes and then zooms off to the next box.

When we have a package delivered, she has to drive across the street to our house (the horror of it, I know).

So yesterday I was getting the girls out of the Mom-Mobile after picking the Big One up from preschool when the mail carrier pulls up to the driveway. I walked down to her car and said, “Great, you have my boxes. Thank you so much.”

Mind you, I walked down the driveway to her. She simply got out of her car, walked around it to the passenger side, opened the passenger door and retrieved the two packs of boxes.

This is what she said to me, “OH Yeah, I hate these things. It’s a pain to deliver them to everyone. I hate when the commercial comes on and ‘says no matter how many you need we will deliver them.’ Them people making commercials aren’t the ones who have to deliver ‘em.”

To which I smiled and said, “Well I appreciate that you do it. It makes my life so much easier to not have to drag my two kids in with me to pick up the boxes. So thank you.”

She grunted at me, waved me off and said, “whatever, I have to deliver them all over town” got back in her car and sped off.

Are you kidding me? It’s not as if she had to carry them an exorbitant distance.  It’s not snowing, raining or 110 °. She doesn’t walk up and down the streets with a heavy bag of junk mail like most mail carriers do. She drives around in her little car. She has to pull out a small load of mail to sort and occasionally has to walk up someone’s driveway to deliver a box.

Is it really that difficult? Trust me, I’ll gladly take her job. I could make some money,  bring the girls with me and deliver boxes with a smile.