Bead it
Monday September 12th 2022, 9:27 pm
Filed under: Life

Her fourth sale on Etsy. She told me it would take a few weeks to get made, and I, picturing one woman holding down everything while a frickin’ war is going on around her, told her I was in no hurry: in whatever time worked for her was good for me.

She was very pleased when that went out and after a long wait in Kiev, noted when it continued on.

The package (we won’t blame the gerdan inside) landed in San Francisco, got taken to my town, decided it liked the bar code scene better up in The City and hijacked a mail truck to get back to drinking in the view at its favorite hangout, got caught, and got brought back down here.

Where it sat in timeout.

And sat.

And sat.

While this good woman who’d spent so much time creating sunflowers of her own design out of Czech beads sent me an agonized note: she’d been following the tracking and had begun to believe it might never come. (She didn’t say, we got it past the war here, what on earth is up with the American postal service?)

She may have been afraid that I would make her make another one at no pay to make good on the order, but I’ve been following that tracking just as much as she has and I know she did that work and this is not her fault.

I assured her that if it didn’t come today I was going to drive to that post office with the tracking number in hand.

Usually the mail comes after dinner. Today it came in the afternoon. It was not there–but for once I knew what the status was for the day before the place closed. I kept my promise and drove over.

I told the kind and concerned clerk my story: this vendor in Ukraine had created this for me and was distraught that it might be lost. Could you help me help her feel a whole lot better about this one thing that she’d put heart and soul into?

I actually had another package of no particular importance that had been sitting there for a month, per the tracking, and could they find that, too.

She spent a long time in back while I read the latest Ukraine war updates on my phone, silently cheering their successes. I thought about Oleksandra, whose brother is in the army and for whom I had mobilized in my own little way because at least it was something I could do.

She finally came back. The tracking number for the other package didn’t exist, she told me. (I notified that vendor that they were going to have to go after them.) This one–pointing at the number with UA for Ukraine in it–was delivered this morning.

I assure you it was not, I told her. The mail came but it was not in it. (And if someone ever tells you I ever get mail in the morning other than during Christmas rush they are outright lying to you, I decided not to say out loud. We are at the end of their route.)

She gave me the supervisor’s business card so I would have that phone number and assured me they were being notified.

The hope is that it is still on the truck and that it will come tomorrow.

But either way, I have Oleksandra‘s back and that’s what matters.


3 Comments so far
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Did you have a substitute driver today? We used to have packages scanned as delivered when they weren’t, but they then showed up the next day. They also used the trick of scanning as delivered at the beginning of the shift.

We had workers who parked in front of our mailbox today. I watched from the front yard as the mailman (a sub) started to slow down, saw the truck, sped up, and didn’t deliver to us at all!

We actually have a box in front of our house. A couple of blocks away, where houses are newer, they have the new communal boxes.

Comment by Anne 09.13.22 @ 12:36 am

Tell Oleksandra that a whole bunch of us are sending good juju in the direction of her package and hoping that it will arrive today! If it can get out of a war zone, it better survive the US Postal Service! And of course now many of us know of her work and will be tempted to buy a pretty thing.

Comment by Margo Lynn 09.13.22 @ 7:17 am

Oh, doesn’t “it was delivered this morning” sound like something they thought they’d try to get you to leave! I hope it shows up soon. The USPS is not what it used to be, sadly.

Comment by ccr in MA 09.13.22 @ 7:26 am



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