Flashing Neon Sign

Flashing Neon Sign

This is it. I’m throwing in the towel and putting up a flashing neon sign. It will be 20 feet tall, be orange and yellow and say “O’Bryan”. This isn’t because I’m becoming eccentric. This is a necessity. People apparently need a sign that big and that bright to find our house.

You see, our address is number 18 and we have that clearly labeled on our house and on our mail box. But for some reason, delivery people and vendors cannot find our house. Instead, our stuff goes across the street to number 19.

We don’t know why this is. We very rarely receive things for number 19. But our neighbors constantly receive our things. Take the case of my daughter’s pizza. My daughter received a gift certificate for a pizza place as a graduation present. One day, she was hungry for a pizza. She called a couple of hours before she had to work to order a pepperoni pizza and asked to have it delivered.

We are very clear in giving our address. We say number eighteen and for emphasis we say number one eight. Very simple. Very clear. The pizza was promised in half an hour. After nearly an hour, she called and was told it was on its way. She repeated our address. Number eighteen. Number one eight.

After an hour and a half and no sign of the pizza, she made herself a sandwich and called the pizza place back saying the pizza had never arrived and that she had to leave for work. A few days later I learned from my neighbor that the pizza delivery boy brought tried to deliver a pepperoni pizza to them.

On another occasion my neighbor mentioned that a lawn service company had come and sprayed their yard. They didn’t use a lawn service. They hadn’t ordered any lawn care. I asked her what company. Sure enough, it was my company. I called my lawn service company to ask when they were going to treat my lawn. I was told they had just been to my address. “No you haven’t” I advised them. “You went to my neighbor’s house across the street”. The sad part is that I had been using this service for a few years by then.

The same thing happened with my pest control company. When the guy didn’t show up for the appointment, I called to check. He had gone to number 19 instead of number 18. Sad again because I also had been using this pest control company for a number of years.

My neighbors across the street frequently bring our mail to us because it winds up in their mail box. Recently a check intended for us went to their mail box – our address, their box. I have a magnet on my front door. They came over and left the check on my front door in the magnet. Thank heavens we have great neighbors across the street! It was a nice healthy check. When you are self employed as a freelancer, the check is always in the mail. It’s just nice when it’s your mail and you actually receive it!

Curiously, this misdelivery phenomenon is a one way kind of deal. We do not get their mail or pizzas or services. We’d like to. They had new Pella windows installed a few years ago. I am sure those lovely windows would look just as nice over here.

This year they both retired from 20 year plus careers at the same company. They celebrated by purchasing some new televisions and getting satellite TV service. I know we’d enjoy that! Last year they put in granite countertops in their kitchen. They are absolutely gorgeous and would look stunning in my kitchen as well. Right now they are having their deck remodeled with that man made decking material that never wears out. I was noticing our deck has a few warps and splits in it. New decking material would be excellent. But nothing of theirs shows up here. Just vise versa.

What is particularly annoying about this is that I work at home. So I am here when this stuff happens. Our door bell works just fine. There is no reason not to knock on our door. But it’s like the Maytag repair place over here!

It happened again today. My daughter is doing a semester abroad in London this fall through her college. She wants to do an internship and has applied for a British VISA. She received an automated call early this morning from an overnight mail delivery service that she had an overnight letter requiring her signature. We waited all day – eight hours to be exact.

We could have driven to Chicago in that length of time. Of course, we put the time to good use. I cleaned out the garage. We watched a movie I rented yesterday. We caught up on all our email. At 4 PM we discovered that the overnight mail delivery service went to our neighbor’s house with my daughter’s mail.

These absolutely wonderful neighbors aren’t home. They are in Columbus Ohio at a church event. We are taking care of their mail. We called the overnight mail delivery service and made arrangements to go pick up this letter. The pick up site is across town and the pick up window is only open from 7 PM to 7:30 PM. That’s two hours from now. I guess in that amount of time we could always order a pizza and have it delivered.