Our letter carrier left this slip at our house the other day. Evidently someone had sent us a letter that required an additional 20 cents’ worth of postage.
It’s a good thing we know where the post office is, since, evidently, the post office does not. You could spend the rest of your days driving the streets of our fair city, you could comb through maps, atlases, and gazeteers, you could MapQuest, Google Map, and Google Earth until overcome by hunger, thirst, and sleeplessness, and you would never find 320 S WND AVE. Indeed, you would never find WND AVE at all. There is no such thing.
You might, however, with a certain amount of detective work, stumble upon 320 S 2ND AVE, which is where the downtown post office (Downtown Station, in current parlance) resides. And where, 20 cents later, our daughter claimed our undelivered envelope.
It’s true that 2 and W sit awfully close together on the keyboard. And it’s true that in this era of budget cuts and over-reliance on electronic backstops, proofreading by actual breathing, thinking human beings is one of the first fatalities (at the hands of breathing but not thinking human beings, usually). But it is both true and deliciously ironic that mail sent to the address provided by the post office itself would be returned as undeliverable by, yep, the post office.
