Too late to answer those Christmas party invites. Too late to shop those year-end catalog sales. Too late to send in those credit card bills on time.
Still, better late than never for North Side residents in the 60613 ZIP code, who received some two months worth of undelivered mail on Friday and Saturday.
“I just got married, so I was waiting for all kinds of stuff,” said Gina Lilja, 29, of 3721 N. Greenview Ave. “And things just weren’t coming. I thought, `What the heck?’ “
More than 30,000 pieces of mail were discovered in the back of a mail carrier’s truck on Feb. 4, according to postal officials. The letter carrier, a postal employee since 1990, has been suspended without pay.
So while federal attorneys examine the case, anxious North Siders began examining their mail, some of which dated to early December.
For Lilja, the first task was trying to figure out how to send unwanted compact discs back to her music club without telling them the postal equivalent of “My dog ate my homework.”
“We got billed for them; then we got late charges on them,” she groused.
But the weekend deliveries also yielded a treasure trove of goodies worthy of a belated Christmas: makeup kits, wedding gifts, a check from Mom, and a baby shower invitation that may at last smooth over some ruffled feathers.
“The person who invited me thought I didn’t want to go,” Lilja explained. “It was so embarrassing. I said, `I really didn’t get my invitation,’ and she said, `That can’t be. Everyone else got theirs.’ “
Downstairs, neighbor Ronald Hayden used invitations to his own party to get to the bottom of the mail menagerie.
“I had a large party the first weekend in January and I mailed myself an invitation just to see what would happen,” said Hayden, 33, a lawyer.
Come Saturday, that invitation still hadn’t arrived, though multiple copies of Baseball Weekly were spilling out of the mailbox, along with missing tax documents and a few late Christmas cards.
“At this point, they’re figuring that the carrier just didn’t feel like delivering certain days,” said Sandra Doherty, a supervisor with the U.S. Postal Service’s Niles Branch.
“I’m just surprised he kept it some place,” Lilja said, “and didn’t trash it.”
