The Notebook
I’m back from Alaska, and while I have many lovely things to write about my trip, I first have to get this ridiculous story out there. Because the combination of my foolishness plus the U.S. Postal Service can only end like this:
On our second night on the Aleutian Islands ferry, it stopped in the tiny village of Sand Point, Alaska around 10:15 pm, so it was rather late to stroll around. But I got off to stretch my legs, along with my dad, a girl I ended up befriending on the ferry and her mom. My friend said her coworker had grown up there, and had told her own mother to look for the ferry when it arrived. We noticed a small woman standing alongside a SUV at the dock, and sure enough, she was the mom, and she offered to give us a tour of her village. The tour was pretty simple: Here’s the “big shop,” here’s the health clinic, here’s the pool where I finally learned to swim when I turned 60 (which is crazy, because can you imagine growing up on an island and not knowing how to swim?). Anyway, she had a little gift shop, so I asked if we could stop and buy something to thank her for our tour. I bought four glass Japanese float balls, these beautiful orbs that wash up on the beaches in Alaska after they detach from the fishing nets of Japanese fishing boats. They’re gorgeous, and almost totally worth the rest of this story…
We thanked her for her tour, got back in the car and I got on the ferry and realized, shit, my little black moleskine notebook, where I’ve taken all of my quotes and notes from the last 5 days, is not in my pocket. Which means it’s somewhere on that freaking tiny island. So I have a massive panic attack, and climb into my bunk bed and start writing down everything I can remember from the past five days, while fighting off the urge to hurl myself off the boat. (I have a penchant for the dramatic.) Meanwhile, my dad goes and finds the girl who I befriended, gets the phone number for the little old lady, waits patiently for the purser to take him upstairs to the captain, who has the only satellite phone on the entire ferry. He calls the old lady (it’s midnight by now), explains the situation, and the notebook is found in the backseat of her car. He gives her my address, she says it’ll be in the mail tomorrow, and all signs point to me getting my notebook back and maybe not being such a terrible journalist after all.
Cut to yesterday evening, when the package arrives in my mailbox, with a huge tear in it… and no notebook. Apparently the Delivery Confirmation scanning label matters little. I called my dad to tell him and he almost started to cry. Cut to this morning at the post office, where apparently mail service is really only important if things are IN envelopes. Should they rip and fall out, you’re essentially f*&ked. Cut to the second higher ranking post office, where I’m told that my postal carrier remembers delivering the ripped envelope yesterday (thanks, awesome job there) and anything that falls out of an envelope gets sent to Atlanta, where I assume all the postal workers light it on fire and dance around it, since I’m told there’s no protocol in place for actually retrieving anything that’s gone missing in the mail.
“So if your grandma sent you her diary, and it went missing, it’d essentially be gone for good?” I asked the woman. To which I got a litany of excuses: they should have insured it, that envelope was wrong. And I’m like, someone in another post office in Alaska gave her that envelope. It had a delivery confirmation stamp on it. And it did not arrive. And they basically looked me in the eye and said screw you.
So now I’m tapped into a vast wide web of post office protocol. I’ve learned from the aptly named Failure magazine that the pyre I expected in Atlanta is actually the Mail Recovery Center, where 15% of letters and 25% of packages are actually returned. The rest are put up for auction. I’ve spoken with a consumer representative, who has offered me a confirmation number (for what? confirming the inevitable?) and said I’d receive a call tomorrow, whether my item is found or not. Such is the saga of The Notebook. Stay tuned.
Tags: Failure, Inadequacy, Journalism Pratfalls, Mail Screwups, Postal Service
August 28th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Argh, good luck! At the very least, you have an unexpected travel and hellish bureaucracy story to tell in lieu of those recorded in your notebook. =^/
August 28th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Oh man Janelle! It was bad enough loosing your notebook in the first place, but to think it was coming back to you, only to find the package empty is a nightmare! I think the gods are messing with you. You didn’t step on some ancient forbidden grave site or something in Alaska did you?
If it makes you feel any better, after I returned from three months in Germany in 07, I managed to loose all three months of photos from my computer. Totally my fault. Totally stupid. I got a few back which I had emailed to other people… But the rest were gone. (I’m talking HUNDREDS of photos.) Doh!
I went back and re-shot a lot of them earlier this summer, but I’m still feeling pretty dumb over the whole thing.
There’s still a chance your notebook will show up. I’ll be pulling for you.
RJ
August 29th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Nooooooooo!
April 6th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
I found your blog through pret a voyager, and this is the first post I’ve read. I never comment on blogs, but I must tell you that a few years ago I sent my mother’s third grade classroom a package full of pencils and stickers from my favorite store in la’s chinatown, and the package was destroyed en route. over the course of three or four months, my mother and I received six or seven plastic bags from the usps which contained all of the pencils and sticker packets except ONE. keep the faith and I’ll cross my fingers for you.
April 6th, 2010 at 11:56 pm
Anna, you give me hope! Thanks for reading. I’ve got my fingers crossed that my notebook (and all of the many things that went tucked within it) will return. Maybe it’ll have some stickers in it.