My interim snail mail address, until I move to my new urban digs, is a rural mailbox. The kind that sits on top of a pole by the side of the road. It’s shaped kind of like a loaf of bread, has the requisite front door you unlatch to retrieve the mail, and a flag on the side that can be raised or lowered. The way this is supposed to work is if the flag is up, there is mail in the mailbox. The flag is also used to notify the mailman to collect outgoing correspondence.
I don’t know about you, but I rarely mail anything. I was very glad when the post office decided that stamps would no longer have a monetary value printed on the front. Back when stamps were relegated to a set cost lane, there was always an awkward period after the inevitable increase, say from ten cents to twelve cents, when you had to take a special trip to the post office to stock up on one or two cent stamps.
I don’t often have occasion to use them but still feel the need to keep a few stamps around just in case. I’m much happier with the current situation where stamps have a letter on them that indicates the type of postage they can be used for. A happy byproduct of this is the ability to engage in stamp arbitrage. My “P” stamps never lose their ability to ferry letter mail anywhere in the country, even though I bought them some time ago. For example, the internet tells me that Canada Post raised the price of a domestic stamp to $1.44, up from $1.15, in January of this year. If I had bought my current stash of stamps in 2014 (not too much of a stretch) for $1.00, they have gained 44% in value. And who knows what heights they’ll reach in the future?
But back to my mailbox. Collecting the mail requires a concerted trip, so at most the box gets checked once a week. I don’t get a lot of standard letter mail, since for a long time now the bills have been delivered (and paid) electronically. But I do get magazines. Many, many magazines. Yes I know, I could read them online but that is not the same as relaxing on the deck while thumbing through the latest issue of Vanity Fair, Toronto Life, or Bon Appetit. My other beef with the online content is they often publish it right there for anyone to read (nonsubscribers included) before the physical issue comes out. There is nothing worse than receiving a fresh new magazine only to discover I’ve read half of it already.
But I digress. We were talking about the mailbox. Some of my subscriptions send me an email to let me know my copy is on the way. This is helpful because then I know when to check the mailbox. In theory. For weeks now, the flag on the mailbox has been stubbornly in the relaxed position, even though Toronto Life assured me the September issue had been set free into the world.
So this is what I did: I opened the mailbox anyway. Low and behold, it was filled with magazines. Plus a letter from Canada Post. This is what it said: “To serve you better, effective August 15, we will no longer be raising mailbox flags to indicate that mail has been delivered. You may still place outgoing mail in your box and indicate that you require a pickup by raising the flag.”
In a nutshell, the post office has removed the only useful use for the flag. In a sensible world, they would have raised the flag for the final time when they delivered the notification letter. Oh. Wait. Never mind. Yet another reminder that sense no longer exists. At least my magazines still exist. At least for now.