One got through

I am very fond of the US Postal Service, particularly the segment of it that operates within and out of the Forsyth, MO and Rockaway Beach, MO post offices.  Although I do get tired of wrangling with the somewhat less than efficient USPS website, I am thankful that, with effort, I can buy stamps and calculate shipping rates from the comfort of my home office.  And I am continually amazed that every day except Sunday, our national postal service manages to deliver some 660,000,000 pieces of mail, virtually all of it correctly.

Wikipedia, that truly esteemed source of knowledge, says, “The United States Postal Service employs some 574,000 workers, making it the third-largest civilian employer in the United States behind the federal government and Wal-Mart. . . Each day. . . the United States Postal Service delivers some 660 million pieces of mail to as many as 142 million delivery points.”

But any system can be fallible.

Today I received a letter in a sealed, hand-addressed envelope, sporting no return address, no postmark, and a non-cancelled, 49-cent stamp.  It did have our ZIP+nine imprinted at the bottom beside a series of bars, so it must’ve gone through some machine somewhere, but I suspect it slipped through a processing crack and never really should have made it to our mailbox.  It turned out to be a 2014 donation receipt from a ministry, and I’m guessing it was mailed somewhere in northern Virginia.  I’m also guessing our trusty mail carrier, Vanessa, brought it on out to us just because she’s nice that way.