Me to my neighbor last May: We’re just going to forward our mail to Wisconsin over the summer.
Neighbor: You don’t want to do that. It takes too long. We can collect your mail and mail it to you.
Me: Thanks. But it’ll be easier to forward it.
Ugh! If only I’d listened to her! I could NOT submit the forward request online (my address is not in the system for some reason). So I went to the PO. Ok. Done.
We stopped receiving mail 2 weeks before I told them to start. Is that because they put our mail on a third class boat and it takes two weeks to arrive at the forwarded address?
I think all my trouble started when I told our deliveryman that I’d like my mail delivered until the day we left. He said it was in a box at the post office and that would be no problem. Ok! But….we left on May 31st. By mid-July…we had received nada at my Mom’s…
So I sent a quick text to my friend who works in the Rincon PO. It’s good to have connections!
As it says, my wise neighbor said some mail was still getting delivered to our house. But I didn’t think all of it was there, and none of it was here, so my mail must’ve been in some sort of mail limbo! I asked my postal worker friend to help me reinstate my forwarding..
But by late July, we still had a mail blackout. The two weeks it should’ve taken the mail-by-boat came and went. I’d had it! We were returning to PR in two weeks anyway! I had Amazon (lovely Amazon) items to purchase. Would they get to my doorstop only to reverse course and get shipped back to my mom’s in Wisconsin?
Message from my neighbor
Just to be sure – I sent some packages to my neighbor’s house instead. I was ordering school supplies afterall. Nana doesn’t need those 😉
I eventually worked with my postal worker friend to cancel all forwarding. Since our address isn’t recognized in the USPS system, I couldn’t do it online. That would be too easy!!
All our packages, gracias a Dios, weren’t redirected north. But….just this week (third week in September mind you)…I just received two items of mail with a stamp that said, ‘unable to deliver.” One was a bill due in August. Good thing I pay online!!
Lesson learned: when your Puerto Rican neighbor tells you not to use a Puerto Rican service (even the US Postal System), listen to her! (Stick to just mailing stuff, like 54 boxes of your belongings! haha)