Another month when I don’t have all the bills I need to pay. I mail bills on or before the 25th if they are due on the 1st. When I was in the post office on Monday, one medical insurance bill hadn’t arrived 13 days before it’s due date.
I have two choices. Drive into the post office every day to see if it’s arrived, or take my checkbook with me and write a check in the car tomorrow. With the pandemic, I’ve cut my trips to the post office to one a week to minimize risks, so it’ll be in the car tomorrow.
In case the bill isn’t there, I’ll take an envelope and stamp with a copy of a previous bill to mail.
The pandemic and changes in the management of the Post Office may be making it difficult to pay in a timely fashion, but the insurance company’s computer systems haven’t been reprogrammed. Paying late, especially if I have develop a record of paying late, means I risk having my insurance cancelled.
I discovered a similar scheme earlier this week with my bank. It was sold to an out-of-state company last year, and things have been getting worse. My last savings account statement showed it was now paying the same token interest it was paying on the checking account.
I got a call from someone this week because the bank hasn’t been able to send me my next order of blank checks. While we were talking, I discovered the bank had changed the rules on activity. It used to be one had to make one transaction a year to avoid an account going dormant. This was apparently some government rule instituted after 9/11. If it was dormant, you had to file paperwork to get access.
This time she said accounts go inactive in six months and dormant in a year. The reactivation paperwork is required for inactive accounts. It now charges fees on dormant accounts.
In the past I did my yearly transaction at the time when I did the government required annual withdrawal from my IRA. Well, the lobby is still closed, and that transaction is too complicated to do in the drive through.
So, the bank is closed for activity, but if I don’t act I get penalized by both it and the federal government. And, the bank makes additional money off me.
Fortunately, the woman I talked to sent me an email address, and told me to send her requests for these transactions. That’s more than another bank I used to use offered when it changed hands.
I don’t need news stories to tell me the post office service has gotten worse. I track the books I order which come through media mail. That used to take two weeks. Now it averages three.
The last time I checked the tracking, the truck with the package arrived in Española from Albuquerque around 11:30 am. The truck used to arrive before the post office opened. That adds a day’s delay.
At the beginning of the year I noticed that packages that arrived in Denver were being sent to Las Vegas instead of Albuquerque. Las Vegas, of course, has had some of the most serious problems with the Coronavirus. That rerouting adds at least two days, plus an extra set of handling.
Delays are being added everywhere, even though we’ve had six months to adjust to doing things remotely.
About two weeks ago, Wikipedia stopped updated the Coronavirus page for New Mexico by 7:30 pm. Now, I find the update the next day. When that is added to the days when the totals are the same or go down, one loses all confidence in the timeliness of the information.
In the past two weeks we’ve had 26 active cases, down from the highs in late July. However, the number of deaths increased to 10, although only three occurred in the past two weeks.
The local website on wildfires maintained by the Forest Service was really useful when some employee got the idea of using blogging software to keep people informed. That was years ago. Management became involved. Updates became official releases. And now, they come out a day late.
I don’t have to tell anyone we’re having serious problems with smoke right now from a fire near Nambé, plus a huge fire near Grand Junction, Colorado, and all those fires in California. The weather bureau Air Quality forecast is still making predictions that let me know in advance I should wear a mask.
The Forest Service updates are a day late and only confirm what I suspect. Confirmation is necessary. One can’t just go on assumptions about conditions based on problems with breathing. That creates the possibility that I might dismiss something important.
Sources:
Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated daily.
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