OT. Slower Mail Delivery

It's a CanaBuck with Canada Post.

They are too a long time friend from when I lived in Philadelphia and I moved to CT. For work I was often on the road and at lunch or taking a break, there was time and I always had a folder and lined pad. I'd write some general things you may talk about in conversation. Could be a great dinner last night, some photography stuff of mutual interest, family going on. Humor is often a portion.

It would take up to a couple of weeks to fill three pages, each segment dated as I went. Then it was dropped in the mail.

Do I love her? Yes. Are they love letters? No. My wife has seen them, her husband has read them. There is nothing intimate in them.

We've been friends for 45 years, writing to her for 40 years and now we are both widowed and I also visit for a week or two at a time but still not intimate. Many people don't understand that.

In my apartment 50 years ago they had an old style collection box near the entrance with the long chute you could reach from your car. In my condo I think it was just a box like the residents had that didn't really lock. Any kind of key would open it. In those days people really thought stealing mail was a federal crime and the postal inspector would hunt you down. That feeling has waned.

Oh, that makes sense. I'm sure they're alll that way. Never mind. (I actually thought of that possibility when I reread my own post, but when Ed said "We clip envelopes on the outside of the mailbox and the carrier takes them away.", for some reason I figured it would be the same at cluster boxes. I have a simple mind.

But you still can't mail a letter from your own doorway.

I believed you the first time. It's good to have a friend.

Certainly there are a lot of possible reasons not to change.

I have several female friends like that. I have known them for 40-50 years too.

I've never actually been gone for a year, but I take the height of the pile of mail at 3 months and prorate that to the height of the slot. I think I have room for 4 years, but it might be hard to get inside at that point.

I don't know what would happen. AFAIK, I've never gotten any. At least nothing was sitting on the stoop when I got home (and there were no notes from the USPS. 2017 to 19, I was away for 3 months, 2 months, and 3 months respectively. I stayed home in 2020 to watch the election news! And because I was tired.

My friends all knew I was away and I didn't buy anything online.

One time when I was here, the mailman left my new box of checks sitting outside for anyone to steal because, I guess, he thought it woudln't have fit through the slot. It just fit. That annoyed me a lot.

And sort of unrelated: in November of 2007 I was away and I had a new used laptop that I had just bought off of ebay. I thought it would be cool to buy a battery for it on ebay and have it sent from Hong Kong to Europe, without passing through the USA. But it didn't come. I called them, and because I hadn't told Paypal I was leaving the country, they cancelled the order and didn't bother to write me that they had. Instead they sent a postal letter to my home in the US with a code so I could rejuvenate my Paypal account. Of course I wasn't there. I was in Greece, which is why the battery was supposed to go to Greece. They could have figured that out, or emailed me. They never seemed to understand what they did wrong.

If they'd emailed me, I could have had a friend go to my house, find the letter, and email the text to me.

As it is, I paid a guy in the dorm I was staying to use his Paypal account (he didn't charge extra), bought it again, and it arrived one day before I returned to the US. A day later I never would have gotten it.

When we had the mailbox on the porch there was a clip on the outside of the box where you put your outgoing mail if you didn't want to walk a few hundred feet to a mailbox. The mailbox was right across the street from our house so it was no big deal. I did know a few people who used that clip tho. Being on the outside of the box the mailman could see it and come get it if you were not getting anything that day. As I said that was in DC about 55 years ago. Now there are people nervous about putting mail in a mailbox. They tell us all the time not to put your mail in your own mailbox with the flag up until right before the mailman comes, certainly not overnight, because people steal it.

Or three. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. They'd still need sorters to work on the weekend.

Cindy Hamilton

Amazing how many people assume any man and woman are sleeping together. I'd not be invited to stay if she did not 100% trust me. Most times we are at her $3million ocean front vacation home.

Yeah, I would get behind a three days per week schedule.

Currently, I get all my vendor, statements and credit card bills online- and pay them all the same way from my checking account. I even pay my property tax bill online from my checking account. And the IRS website has a free direct pay portal for quarterly estimated tax payments debited from my checking account. I don't remember the last time I wrote out- much less mailed- a paper check.

The postman only leaves stuff in my mailbox maybe three days a week anyway- and that's mostly junk mail advertising that never makes it futher into the house than the trash bucket in the garage.

- I don't mean to brag, but...I just put a puzzle together in one day and the box said 2-4 years.

We started out as a street with numbers but had an RD address. Later the county came in and renumbered us and that was our mailing address. Weird because number is three digits yet there are only ten houses on our cul-de-sac street. I had to look up grid address.

Last 12 months I wrote 2 checks. One I mailed to a Mr. Cash that has a small business.

We have some friends that own a cottage. They have renumbered the cottages on their road 3 times in 20 years. The owner is a woodworker and makes his own street number plaques.

They have the original address plaque on their dock, facing towards their lot, so as not to confuse boaters. They have the previous address plaque on their shed, facing away from the road so as not to confuse drivers.

They have 2 plaques with the current address, one on a tree facing the road and one on the wall of the cottage that faces the lake.

If the town changes their address again, they'll probably put the current plaque on the fire pit, facing sideways. ;-)

Be aware that most, if not all, banks will declare your account inactive if no checks are written and/or no in-person deposits are made in a year's time. After some more time, account is declared dormant, and turned over to your State's "unclaimed funds" system.

Look up your banks's T&C's re inactivity.

Unfortunately, direct deposits, bill pays, PayPals, etc DO NOT count.

Ask me how I know :-(

In the age of electronic banking that does not seem to be a good idea. I have accounts in my CT bank and have not been there for three years. I have written a few checks though,

I have never written a check on my FL checking account, just electronic deposits and ATM cash.

I could do everything with just my local bank but since everything works for years with the other one, never had incentive to change.

My idea is similar. As the carriers retire or leave go to mail on Mon, Wed, Fri one route and Tue, Thu, on another route, then alternate. There is very little mail that an extra day or two would matter. If something has to be on a certain time, there is Fed Ex and UPS.

They could turn the mail over to the UPS or Fed EX. They seem to be making money. That might even be a way out of the pension system. Like the company I worked for. They changed owners and stopped the pension for the new hires and paid off the pension for those that had been there a short time.

At my house that is in the country, we just put the outgoing mail in the box at the side of the road and raise the flag. Mail carrier picks up the mail and drops the flag.

There is not lock or security at all.

I did.

It might be "most banks" but it's definitely not "all". In my case, a very small aggregate balance keeps my accounts active. Note that this is an "and" list, so all 3 criteria must be met.

1. MyBankName will assess an Inactive Account/Low Balance Fee of up to .00 each month, close your account(s) and change the status to Inactive on accounts of owners 18 years or older if:

a. You have not initiated activity for one year, AND b. The aggregate balance in all your share accounts is less than $100.00, AND c. You have no active loans.

I also called to get clarification on Criteria A, specifically "You have not initiated activity for one year."

Any type of activity, included direct deposit and bill pay are considered as activity. Essentially, any transaction (other than the crediting of interest by the bank) is consider to be an activity initiated by the account holder.

Do you know because you have an account at a very unfriendly bank?