Typical.

For those of you who may have missed this tidbit, I do payroll for a living. I work for a company that specializes in payroll, and I have a client base of about 200 companies for which I do some semblance of payroll processing. This can range from simply checking it over when they've submitted it through one of our software systems to doing everything for them from start to finish. Now, most of you will know that every year around this time, your payroll department issues your annual W2 for the previous year so that you can file your taxes. (For those of you outside the US, I'm sure you have something similar.) As you can imagine, this is an incredibly busy time for payroll. Last Saturday, we all schlepped into the office to pack up the W2s for our ~1,100 clients. Clients that range from one employee to several hundred. For six hours we stuffed envelopes and weighed packages and stuck on postage labels and recorded tracking numbers

That's a lot of paper, kids.

We were lucky it didn't take longer. What with all this COVID nonsense, we had fewer W2s for 2021 than we would usually, but we were still down a couple of team members because we've had exposures and people catching The Dread Disease just like every other place of employ has recently. Thankfully, all of our exposures so far have been outside the office, and we are well aware that we're lucky in that. Our Implementation department stepped up and came in to give us a hand, and we are eternally grateful. It would have been far longer than six hours if it hadn't been for them.

Saturday afternoon saw our conference room full of mail bins stacked to the brim with packages of W2s ready to be collected. On Monday, a delightful fellow from the US Postal Service came and took all the bins away for mailing.

We breathed a collective sigh of relief. W2 packing is not for the faint of heart.

Fast forward to Wednesday. The doorbell rings, announcing that someone has come in. My desk is closest to the door, so I get up to see who it is. It's a mail carrier.

"Oh. Hello," I said.

"Hello," he replied. "I understand you have some boxes to be collected?"

"Not today, no. We did, but they were collected on Monday."

"Monday was a holiday," he said, understandably confused, as Monday had been a federal holiday which technically meant no mail service.

"Yes, and the pickup was scheduled for Tuesday, but we had a special agreement with the Postmaster, and they sent someone to pick them up on Monday."

"Oh." He looks at the paper in his hand. "You see, I have a slip here, dated for today, with a scheduled pickup of yesterday...and they came and got them on Monday?"

"They did, yes."

And then this sweet little old man, probably about three weeks away from retirement and looking forward to spending more time with his grandchildren, delivered the most wonderfully accurate and telling statement regarding the organizational aptitude of the United States Postal Service that I have ever heard uttered from an employee of that organization. Staring at the pickup slip in his hand, he shook his head, sighed, and said,

"Typical Post Office."