Thursday 12 February 2015

The tale of lost things

continues on the other blog. In a slightly spooky way there has now been the discovery of a baseball cap that does not belong there on the floor of their bedroom. To be fair it is possible that will end up belonging to their grandson.
But...we found something in the letter box that did not belong there. It was a parcel containing a DVD that the Senior Cat had sent to Brother Cat on Christmas Eve. 
We had been worrying at the failure of this parcel to arrive. Senior Cat thought he was getting senile and that he had failed to put the proper postcode on the parcel. I ordered another copy of the DVD in late January thinking it was lost for good as it had not been returned to us either. As two other items have gone missing in recent years we had good reason to think it was gone for good.
Yesterday it appeared. Yes, the address was correct. The sticker on the parcel was ringed at the "unclaimed" point.  Unclaimed?
One of the things that had puzzled us was the fact that there had been no card left in the letter box. By law the post man must leave a card in the letter box if there is nobody at home and an item cannot fit in the letter box. Brother Cat had been expecting the DVD or a note in the letter box. (He also believes the DVD should have fitted in the letter box. The box is a reasonable size.) He would have arranged for the parcel to be collected from the Post Office.
I took the parcel into the Senior Cat and we came to the conclusion that no card had been left. What to do about it? Posting anything is getting ridiculously expensive here and we did not feel inclined to pay twice.
So, I prowled up to the Post Office when it opened. The "girls" who work in the Post Office know me. They know the Senior Cat. I told them pleasantly what I thought might have happened. They looked at one another. They looked at the parcel. They agreed with the possible scenario and then they put a "registered" sticker on it so they could track it. They rewrote the label with one of their own and stuck it on. They gave me the tracking number and said, "Now let's see what happens."
The interesting thing now will be whether the second DVD I ordered will be delivered or whether the postie will simply not bother to leave a card in the letter box.
And no, I did not have to pay to have it re-delivered.

1 comment:

jeanfromcornwall said...

Our Posties are supposed to leave a card too - but they don't always. Sometimes they do, when they can't be bothered to knock on the door to deliver something that is a bit oversize.
Daughter once saw a card come through the door, when the Postie had assumed she was out, and she was able to ring the sorting office at five minutes before the time he had lied on the card, to report him. He will have been on the carpet over that. He hadn't even bothered to have the package with him - he had left it in the sorting office.