Going postal

Due to a billing dispute, the people at the Kenya postal authority have revoked the mailbox that our Nairobi office has used for several years, dating back to my predecessor. (There's no door-to-door mail delivery in Kenya; everything goes to post-office boxes. Side note: One thing I miss about America is the satisfying daily creak of the mailbox being opened by the mailman, or the thwack of a fat magazine sliding through the mail slot. Side note No. 2: Isn't that a very Depression-survivor grandpa thing to say for a 27-year-old? Perhaps.)

Anyway, the postal authority took away our mailbox and reassigned it to another company because they said we didn't pay our yearly bill. This turned out to have been true, only because they never sent us our yearly bill. (I'd say it got lost in the mail, but this situation is even less funny than that joke.) When we told them this, the postal people, to their credit, acknowledged their error. So we don't have a billing dispute per se - what we have is my bank statements, cell phone bills and TV guides going to someone else's mailbox, not to mention our new business cards that just arrived from Washington now list an incorrect address.

The postal people spoke with the new owner of our mailbox, who said he couldn't switch because he'd already printed up office stationary at a cost of about $1,000. This figure seems unlikely unless each letterhead was hand-stenciled by President Kibaki, but I digress. The bottom line is we aren't getting our mailbox back.

Tuesday is a national holiday here, but on Wednesday, office manager Eric is going back to the post office to demand some form of compensation. In the meantime, the postal people have promised to forward our mail to our new mailbox, and if you believe that's going to happen with anything approaching reliability, then I've got some stationary to sell you.