We were talking about the Post Office on here one time and it made me think of an incident that I got involved in a few years ago at the Bertram Post Office.

I walked in one day to transact some business. I found myself behind a young lady being waited on by the Post Mistress herself. The gals mother was driving a truck cross country and found herself out in Ontario, Ca. broke down and in the need of funds. She had left a credit card here at home that she was in desperate need of.
Daughter was trying to overnight it. Miss Post Mistress informed here they couldn’t send packages overnight because it was out of the country. Young lady didn’t have much of a comeback, because her geography wasn’t all that good.

Trying to be helpful, I injected myself into the conversation, explaining that Ontario was just outside of Los Angeles. She said “it doesn’t matter, I can’t send it for tomorrow’s delivery”.

With that I told the young lady to head over to my office, it was just a block away (they were still in the old Post Office at that time) and my gal Deborah would fix her up a Fed-Ex package and send it out for her.

Miss Post Mistress decided it was time she turn her rudeness on me. “YOU CANNOT HAVE THAT CONVERSATION IN THIS BUILDING”. Of course there was a pretty good line waiting by this time. I inquired as to why we couldn’t have that conversation. “because they are our competition………..yap, yap, yap.”

I quit listen about the time the lid blew off my boiling pot and I unleash on her. Needless to say the package got Fed-Ex’d and it was there the next day.

One would have thought she would have figured out that I wasn’t going to listen to her nonsense, but sure enough I was back in there a few days later. At that time we got all of our mail delivered to a P.O. Box, but many people would look us up on the Internet and send something to our physical address. We had recently moved into the old pharmacy building. When things came with the Grange St. address, it would get returned.

I thought it would be easy enough to set a mailbox, close by and when a letter or package came with the street address, it would be delivered. So when I arrived in the Post Office lobby to have a discussion about said plan, I was met with “we don’t deliver if it’s more than 2 blocks away from the Post Office”. Our office was a block away.

I turned and went outside and directly across the side street was house with a bank of mailboxes, and I could see several more from that vantage point. Once more I went in to explain to her how “the cow ate the cabbage”.

I finally turned and left to head back to the office, not sure how high I would have to take this to get something done.

Within a few minutes the Post Mistress was standing in my office with an offer. She would go buy us and other downtown businesses mailboxes. Would I be able to help her put in some posts to mount them on? We struck a deal and a few days later and ever since the folks in the business district of Bertram have had their mail delivered.

The Post Office Motto : “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” has held true for almost 15 years now.

She was always really nice to me from that time on. Not sure how she treated other people, because my trips to the Post Office was limited.