I Should Have Buried St. Gabriel

 A St. Joseph selling kit

There is a tradition that says that when one wants to sell a house, one should bury a statue of St. Joseph in the yard of the house to be sold to help it sell quickly. I have had Catholic and non-Catholic friends tell me they followed this practice, and they all swear their houses sold easily as a result.

I thought it was a hokey tradition, smacking of superstition more than faith, and I decided I would not bury St. Joseph.

But I said a lot of prayers.

And our old house sold quickly. We were fortunate to find a buyer within days after the house was listed. This buyer was both financially able to purchase the house and flexible enough to delay the closing until after we closed on our new home. He was also quite reasonable on the repairs he requested after inspection. All in all, I don’t think St. Joseph could have helped much more. My prayers were enough.

Our move only got dicey toward the end, when our builder needed to delay our closing date by ten days, which ate up most of the overlap I’d planned between taking possession of the new house and vacating the old. By that time, our buyer had sold his current home also, and he needed us to stick to our closing date. Which we did. We closed on our new house on a Thursday, moved into it on Friday, and closed on the old house the following Tuesday. It all got done, though it was a frantic week.

Meanwhile, the biggest problem we had with our move involved the U.S. Postal Service. Our newly constructed home is on a newly paved cul-de-sac, and we are the first to move into a house on this block. Despite the fact that the developer has known our address since at least last October when we signed the contract on the house, nothing was done until mid-June to inform USPS that they needed to enter our new address into their system so that they would be ready to deliver mail at the new address.

It took USPS a month to input our address into their system.

And then they did it wrong. They input the wrong zip code. Even though their zip code map shows our new address being in Zip Code A, and even though every other house in our subdivision is in Zip Code A, they assigned our house to Zip Code B.

The developer tried to get them to fix it. I personally went to the two post offices that handle mail for Zip Code A and for Zip Code B.

The people at Zip Code A threw up their hands. “It’s in the system as Zip Code B. We don’t deliver there.”

The people at Zip Code B said, “We don’t deliver mail to that area. Zip Code A should handle it.”

When I protested that someone at USPS needed to deliver our mail, the Zip Code B employee said, “I’ll have my manager look into it.”

“Will you call me back?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.”

No callback.

Nürnberg St. Lorenz Englischer Gruß Gabriel 01

I did an Internet search for “patron saint of postal workers.” It turns out there is such a saint. It’s St. Gabriel—I guess because he delivered some important messages over the millennia.

That’s who I should have been praying to. So I added him to the litany. To get the mail situation resolved, I would even have buried a statue of St. Gabriel.

The day after I identified St. Gabriel as my true source of help, there were a couple of divine or not-so-divine interventions.

My realtor stopped the mail carrier in the new neighborhood and told her of the problem. “They aren’t taking any houses away from me,” the carrier said. “I’ll get my union rep involved.”

And the developer discovered out that USPS managers at Zip Code A and Zip Code B were married to each other and suggested that this problem should get resolved with a little marital communication over the dinner table.

Meanwhile, I checked the USPS Zip-Code Lookup system daily. Finally, on the Tuesday after we moved—the day we closed on our old house—the USPS system was updated to show Zip Code A associated with our new address.

Unfortunately, this change has not yet made its way into the databases that retailers use, so I am still reluctant to order anything online or to change any addresses for banks or other vendors.

Plus, we still have not received any mail in our new mailbox. (Getting the physical mailbox installed is another part of the story, which I don’t have space to tell today.)

When have you been frustrated by government bureaucracy and incompetence?