Box #1
Jacob and I had an incredible experience this last week. Jacob is very good about getting the mail when he gets home from work every day (I would forget for weeks on end... so I'm very happy to have him around). Last Sunday, we didn't have work and so Jacob remembered to check the mail as we were leaving to go on a walk. There wasn't any mail in our mailbox, but there was a single key on a keyring. A bit puzzled, we examined it. The key chain read:
"Property of the U.S. Postal Service
Locker Number 1
If found Drop in Any Mail Box"
Then had our address written on the bottom
On the Opposite Side it read:
DIRECTIONS
Your mail is larger than will fit in this box. Insert key in same numbered locker and turn to left. Open door and remove all articles.
KEY WILL BE RETAINED IN THE LOCK
Naturally, Jacob and I were excited because this meant that the last of the things we'd ordered online in the last month had arrived! Of course it was too big to fit in our tiny mailbox, so the mailman must have put it in locker number 1 at the post office! All we had to do was run to the post office, and pick it up, right? wrong.
First of all, it was Sunday, so that meant that no one was at the post office to talk to. We realized this before we left, but figured the front of the post office where all the lockers are would still be open, and how hard could it be to find box #1 and open it up? So off we went to the nearest location, key in hand. When we arrived, to our dismay, there was already a key in box #1. That key's tag said something like ours said, then said to collect the mail in box 2P... so we looked for 2P for a while to no avail. We decided that maybe this wasn't our post office after all, even though it was only 4 blocks away. We checked in their phone book of post offices which proved to be little help since it listed nonsensical numbers for the post office locations and our zip code wasn't even listed... A little discouraged, we decided to run home and look it up online.
Turns out we were right, and it wasn't our post office after all! The only other post office I could think of was the one in East Bay, but the address we had seemed to be somewhere between us and East Bay... I was very interested to find this new mystery post office. We had a new address, and set out once again, key in hand. The new address seemed fairly easy to find... but after we hit a certain point in our journey south, it became apparent that the post office was on the other side of the railroad tracks. Luckily Provo is set up in a way that you can't actually cross the railroad tracks except in maybe 3 locations, the nearest one being University Ave. However, seeing as how we were "so close" to the address and we'd have to backtrack a long way to get there, we decided to press on eastward and surely there'd be another place to cross. Of course, being Provo, there wasn't. We wound our way through lots of tiny back streets that neither of us had been on, and eventually hit State Street and finally ended up in East Bay, kind of glad that we took the scenic route. Thinking it would be a good idea to check the address of the East Bay location, we started looking at street signs. It became quite clear that East Bay wasnt' as far south as I had originally thought. We pulled in the parking lot, and lo and behold, we were in the right place! wahoo!
We quickly went inside to retrieve our mail. Only, too bad for us, cause that post office only had letters on their lockers and there wasn't a locker #1 in that whole entire place! We tried locker A, L, I, heck, we even tried locker 2P. that post office was a dud I tell you. After several confused and exhasperated conversations, Jacob turned to look at me very slowly with a certain look in his eye. I recognized it instantly as the "oh my word, we are such idiots" look. In that very instant, I knew exactly why we were such idiots. And we both began to laugh hysterically.
Yes, 12 inches away from our very own mailbox, were two large lockers: 1 and 2. It explained why OUR address was written on the key instead of the post office's, it explained why we'd get such a simple number like '1' for our locker, and it explained why our key chain looked just a little different from all the others at the post offices (which were the biggest questions we couldn't find satisfactory answers for). So, after we took our key on the biggest adventure of it's life, we returned it safely home to locker number one, and took our package inside.
Posted in: on Sunday, October 5, 2008 at at 4:17 PM 2 comments
