So, being a huge Halloween geek, I’m often willing to put in more effort than makes any real sense on assembling a costume. This year’s required sending a jacket to a tailor in Baltimore, who made the alterations I needed and sent it back via USPS “Priority Mail” a week ago. Baltimore, for those of you not on the East Coast, is about a one hour drive from D.C., and that’s with moderate traffic. A week later, the “Priority” package is nowhere to be found, and the tracking info on their site can’t tell me anything other than it left Baltimore last Tuesday. That’s a little irksome in itself, but the truly noxious part is that when I call the post office, they tell me they can’t even start any kind of process to try and find the thing until fourteen days after the package ships. I get the need to not waste resources every time someone bugs out because their mail is a day late, but surely when a box leaves Baltimore on a Tuesday and isn’t at its destination an hour away a week later, it’s self evident that something’s gone wrong? Surely in a sane world, they could just give me a local number for wherever packages go when, say, the label was damaged to see if it’s just sitting in storage somewhere? Next time, private carriers for anything more important than a postcard.