Yes, merely an envelope. Not because of any special postage stamp on it--it has been decades since the middle and high school years of stamp collecting. Not because the envelope had any cherished letter inside. Nor was I going to perform my version of Carnac the Magnificent either!
What was so special about it?
Because, it was a mail that I thought had been lost when it did not reach my parents even after two weeks,when typically letters got to Chennai from Eugene in anything from a week to ten days. Three weeks and nothing. We wrote it off.
And then during one of our daily Skype sessions, father had an update. The mail had reached them.
There was a reason for the delayed delivery. One did not have to dig deep to solve that mystery because it was right there on the front side of the envelope itself:
Figured it out, Sherlock?
Yep, the envelope got sent to Indonesia!
Is it just me, or does interesting stuff happen to everybody too on such regular basis? I find that the cosmos delivers to me more than I can possibly blog about ;)
Should be of interest especially to this old friend, who has been working and living in Jakarta for a while now, and will soon return to the sauna, er, Chennai ;)
(BTW, this is the only time ever, in all my twenty-seven years of mailing to the old country that there has been anything to write about the USPS that has been remarkably efficient, which often makes me wonder why there is all that fuss about the postal system.)
Speaking of Indonesia, did you catch the news about the election (non)result?
3 comments:
Well, Jokowi has won and that's that. It will slllooowwwly be confirmed, but that's what will happen. He had a landslide victory waiting 2 months ago. And now, he's barely squeaking through. The parallels with the Indian election was striking, but with two major differences
- Modi ran a brilliant campaign. Jokowi ran an awful one
- For once India is light years ahead of everybody on something. Voting and the results declaration are on a different league altogether
Despite the reputation of the Ivy League, there are those who do not measure up to expectation. First day of freshman year, we were sitting in the dorm, meeting our roommates and floormates. The student in the room next to mine was from Chicago; I am from Cincinnati. A student from Long Island asked if Cincinnati was in Illinois and if Chicago was in Ohio. I scraped my jaw off the floor and corrected her. Cincinnati has merely 1.5M people and perhaps can be misplaced. But Chicago? That is over 10M people and numerous professional sports teams, a respected university, world-class museums and music and a lake she misplaced. One would expect better from the USPS given that location is their business. At least it arrived and in good shape.
Indeed, if there is one thing that India seems to do well it is the elections. I mean the Election Commission and the conducting of the polls ... it is anarchy here in the US, and every election generates more problems ... Modi did orchestrate a focused campaign, almost like Obama's in 2008 ...
My physical therapist grew up in Cincinnati and fondly remembers the chili from there ;) Anyway, yes, the geographic illiteracy of college graduates--let alone the freshman students--is legendary. Your story does not surprise me at all.
As I noted in the blog post, the USPS has been awesome. This is the first ever time in 27 years that something like this has happened.
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