The woman had received notice that the post office was holding a certified letter, and she dutifully tried to retrieve it.
”Are you the person it`s addressed to?” asked the worker.
”No, it`s addressed to my mother.”
”Are you her legal guardian?”
”No.”
”Then she`ll have to come in herself.”
”She can`t. She`s 102 years old. She lives in a nursing home.”
At the post office, however, rules are rules. To retrieve the letter, the woman would have to go to the nursing home, put her mother in a car, return to the post office and hoist her mother`s frail body up the 10 or 12 stone steps that formed the entrance to the small, wheelchair-inaccessible facility. No way was the woman about to try that.
The postal worker would, however, reveal who had sent the certified letter: the County of Du Page.
A few phone calls unraveled the mystery. ”Your mother moved into a nursing home,” a county employee said. ”The letter is official notice that, because she`s now in a nursing home, she is no longer eligible for in-home care.”
How thoughtful of the county to send a certified notice, which requires a signature, to a 102-year-old woman reminding her that she no longer lived at the address to which the notice was sent.
SOURCE: By Phil Vettel.
OFFICIOUS BUT EFFICIENT We hustled to the nearest working Touch-Tone recently to report a dead phone line in Glen Ellyn. Dialing 611 connected us with Mr. Computer.
We answered Mr. Computer`s questions as he requested: by pushing either
”1” for yes or ”2” for no and entering our problem number.
Mr. Computer explained to us very succinctly that there was a problem with the cable in our area, and that it would be repaired by 6 p.m. the following night.
A passerby aware of our dilemma said it was her understanding the cable would be fixed by 6 a.m.; so we redialed 611 to review the message.
Mr. Computer reminded us that we had already reported this problem, then repeated his message.
Later, while trying to conduct business from a pay phone, we had to repeat our credit card number for a real live operator who had ”accidentally deleted it.”
Score: Mr. Computer 2, live human 0. SOURCE: By Charlene Baumbich.
