Monday, August 18, 2008

Chimneys - part II

For those who may have missed it, I refer back to the original post, Chimneys.

I am pleased to say that my belt-buckle yielding friend returned to my home again to inspect my chimney and make sure we are ready for yet another year of keeping the home fires burning.

I am even more pleased to say that, for the most part, I managed to speak Danish with him this time around! Poor guy had two pups jumping all over him this time, but he didn't seem to mind. I missed a few sentences here and there, hopefully not anything of vital importance, but I managed to communicate with him, and that, my friends, was pretty exciting.

Can't they at least TRY??

At the end of last week I had to send a payment off to the IRS, in the IRS' own envelope. I dutifully put the payment voucher and the payment into the envelope, wrote my return address in the upper left hand corner on the 3 little lines the IRS' envelope provided for that purpose, put some Danish stamps on it and sent it off.

Saturday we opened our mailbox only to find that same envelope had arrived here. How nice of the Danish postal service!

Many complain about the US postal service but honestly, I believe, the USPS does it's job. The mail gets where it's supposed to go - they figure it out. The same cannot be said for the danish equivalent. The envelope was, or course, a little window envelope. If you've ever used them, and I'm sure you have, the little papers inside the envelope can tend to shift around and maybe the address isn't fully readable instantly. You do the shake down to the inside pieces of paper and the address magically reveals itself, etc. Apparently this is too difficult for the danish postal service.

Postal employee A.. "I cannot see the address"
Postal employee B.. "There's an address, there, in the upper left hand corner - send it there"
Postal employee A.. "Ahh yes, perfect!"

Morons - the upper left hand corner is called a "return address" - you don't just send the mail there thinking that's where it's supposed to go! Had they done that with something written on the original such as "Unable to deliver, return to sender" then I would have been slightly less annoyed. At least then I would KNOW why it showed up in my mailbox. But there was nothing - they sent it to the return address apparently because it's an address they found, and that somehow equaled where it was supposed to go.

I was going to take a picture of the envelope for this post, but Ole has now taken the envelope off with him this morning to resend the whole thing in a proper Danish envelope, or something.

p.s. It can't be easy to be married to me. I, of course, in my ranting, took out my frustration for the Danish postal service on my dear hubby - as a Dane, he inevitably gets the blame for any frustration I feel at anything that goes wrong in HIS country. Ooops.
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