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You’ve (not) Got Mail: how the Post Office lost its legendary status
16th July 2025
A small parcel is sent from the US to New Zealand – twice – but is never delivered. A complicated journey, bouncing back and forth across the Pacific Ocean, prompts a bigger question – is our international postal service broken?
By Matt Ragghianti
Remember when the postal service was the Special Forces of correspondence?
The brave men and women who carried the mail (as we call it here in the United States) were so famously reliable it was genuinely inconceivable your item would fail to arrive, no matter how exotic the destination.
As a little boy, I would hand my annual Christmas letter to the postman addressed, in my childish scrawl, only to: Santa Claus – The North Pole. And, somehow, he always got the message (ahem). Oh, and speaking of children, were you aware it was once possible to post AN ACTUAL CHILD from one place to the next? You think I’m kidding. I am not kidding.
So esteemed were the members of the postal service they are inextricably linked with their romantic (if unofficial) slogan: “Neither rain, nor snow, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” A collection of heroes, fighting through blizzards and hurricanes with Olympian determination, ensuring your letter from Mr. Darcy would arrive exactly when promised.
Those days… are deader than disco.
I used to brag about the United States Postal Service to international friends: “You don’t understand,” I’d say with patriotic chest-puffing, “American mail carriers will deliver your letter if they have to rappel down an active volcano to do it!” I was the unofficial spokesperson for the USPS, spreading tales of their legendary reliability like some sort of deranged evangelist.
Slowly but surely, reality arrived on my doorstep. Or rather, came shuffling up to my mailbox, utterly confused about where it was supposed to be.
Today, receiving the mail is like some kind of neighbourhood game show. “Hey, got your electric bill again!”, I’ll call across the fence. “Thanks! Your Amazon package is on my porch!”, comes the reply. My neighbor, Ed, found out my son had been accepted to university before I did.
But the real kicker came when I decided to send a package to my friend, Daisy Dexter in Auckland. I stuffed in a hooded sweatshirt purchased in support of the Pacific Palisades Fire victims, addressed the package with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker, and handed it over to my local post office with the confidence of someone who still believed.
There was just one problem: I wrote “Apt. 40” instead of “Apt. 403.” A mistake, yes. But … a single digit. In the grand scheme of errors, this ranks somewhere between forgetting to use a coaster and accidentally liking your ex’s Instagram post from 2012.
Evidently, this microscopic omission brought down the entire international postal system.
Three months later the package returned to me like a boomerang nobody remembered throwing. But here’s the kicker: when I examined the quilt of labels and redirects stuck to the package, I discovered someone had figured out what I was going for. Because, right there on the package, clear as day, was “Apt. 403” written in official postal service handwriting!
Let me get this straight: they identified the error, corrected it, and then – instead of walking the package up a few floors to deliver it to Daisy – decided the most logical course of action was to send it on a transpacific journey back to me in California. “Well, we solved this puzzle, but that’s enough for us. Let’s make it America’s problem again!”
The package came back with Daisy’s name, her building’s correct address, and the precise apartment number right where it needed to be. But, somehow, the postal service decided that completing the final 0.3% of their job was simply asking too much.
Meanwhile, my friend, Dani in Bogotá, Colombia, was experiencing her own postal purgatory. I’d sent her some specialty chewing gum back in December and the tracking showed it arrived in Bogotá in early January. Excellent!
Dani finally received her gum in April. Four… months… after I sent it. Three months after it arrived in her city. I can only assume it spent those extra months touring Colombia like some sort of cinnamon ambassador. Maybe it was taking Spanish lessons? Or had a spicy fling with a bottle of mouthwash before settling down in Dani’s mailbox.
The gum had probably gone stale by then, but Dani chewed it anyway out of sheer respect for its epic journey. “It tastes like determination,” she texted me, “with hints of bureaucratic apathy.”
So here we are, living in an age where postal workers have apparently replaced their legendary motto with something more accurate: “Neither logic, nor efficiency, nor basic problem-solving will keep us from making this way more complicated than it needs to be.”
The postal service hasn’t just lost its way (and Daisy’s hoodie), it’s actively working against the laws of physics and common sense.
But hey, at least my neighbors and I are closer than ever.