WANDERING LETTER
This afternoon, July 29, I got a letter that was sent to me from Asheville, twenty miles away. The letter was sent on July 9. It went first to Greenville, South Carolina, which is 60 miles from Asheville and 80 from Marshall. Greenville is where all the mail from Asheville, even letters going across town, are sorted and distributed back to Asheville, if that is the destination. I don’t know what happened to this letter after it got to Greenville, but I am guessing that it was a victim of the artificial intelligence of a giant computer. The letter was correctly addressed to me. But pasted over the address was a printed statement, “Unable to Forward/For Review” with a long line of numbers, one of which was R919, maybe reviewer 919. The letter apparently remained in review for three weeks until something read the correct address and it was forwarded to me and put in my mailbox.
I have no way of knowing what actually happened but this is my guess. My guess is that the address of all of the mail is read by a machine, or at least the zip code is, and automatically shipped to the right post office. Maybe the whole address is read of every letter, on some very expensive machine in Greenville, which is why the mail is first sent to Greenville to be sorted. I am guessing that at this point the trouble started. I had tried before the 20th, maybe on the 15th to have my address changed from Swannanoa to Marshall. I filled out a form and left it for the postman. But a week or so later I was told by email that I had to fill out the form again at a post office and show my driver’s license. A few days later I got an email saying that the change had been registered. That was about the 25th. And a day after that I began to get notices that all of my mail, any packages and any letters, would be announced to me before arriving. That happened yesterday and today a UPS package delivered by the postal service and the lost letter arrived, having been announced the day before.
I have a suspicion that all of the mixup was caused by my change of address, even though the letter was clearly addressed to the changed address. Somehow artificial intelligence read the address, knew about the change in address forms, knew about the delay, and then delivered the letter. I have a suspicion that no person ever looked at the address and decided that the letter was not forwardable. I am guessing that everthing in the process of taking three weeks to send a letter 20 miles was handled by a machine designed to speed up service and to avoid human error.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 