We have a very small post office here. If this was England, the town where it is might be called a hamlet because it's so small. I was looking the difference between a hamlet and a village, and one of them was that the hamlet doesn't have a church. Come to think of it, there IS a chapel there, so maybe it really is a village, but it doesn't have any kind of a municipal government.

Anyhow, it's small and the post office serves a lot of people who don't live right there. For example, I drive five miles one way to pick up my mail because there is no delivery to my street address.

The postmaster is a 40-something ex-Marine who is the Barney Fife of the postal service. There have been a lot of complaints about his officious attitude. One memorable time he gave me a five minute lecture about people obtaining the free express mail boxes to use for wrapping Christmas presents: "I could come in your house and arrest you for improper use of those boxes." The stupid thing is I am not the one who did that, nor did the thought of it ever cross my mind until Express Mail Lecture 101 from Postmaster Fife.

Recently, someone mailed me a package with the wrong post office box number. They weren't sure of the number, so just picked one out of the blue and figured being that it's a small post office, no problem, the post office people will figure it out. Oh, my goodness, what a lecture that brought.

I didn't mention the thinking on this to Barney Fife - didn't get a chance - he went into a big spiel about how he may have only 300 mail boxes to keep track of, but if this was a big city like Denver where they have 5000 boxes to service, people wouldn't expect THEM to handle such a challenge. Funny thing, I am sure that Denver would figure it out, not say a word, and be proud of themselves. After all, how do all those letters find their way to Santa Claus? And what's all that hoopla about the Dead Letter Office?

So, the next week, my cousin in South Dakota mailed me a box of iris rhizomes from his garden. He didn't try to guess my mail box number or even my house number on the street address, he just wrote the road name. Naturally, Barney Fife had to make a big deal out of it, but he didn't bring up the 300 versus 5000 argument again, so at least there's that.

Today. Sigh. Another cousin (yes, I DO have a lot of cousins) sent me some more iris rhizomes, this time from southern Illinois. I knew they were due in today, but wasn't ready for the latest crisis. He plunks this box on the counter and starts in. "What do you see wrong with this package? Do you see that it once contained wine, an alcoholic beverage? Do you not know that it is illegal to mail alcohol, bleach or other similar liquids?"

After a couple more minutes of ranting, I said "You're welcome to call the postmaster in Illinois and tell him all this."

I mean really, how can this be my fault?

And he said, "Obviously a postal clerk who should have a postal inspector standing right there was responsible for this. You can see where they tried to cross off the word 'wine' so they knew they were doing wrong. They should never have let the customer get away with this."

You can see why I'm afraid to pick up my mail.