Last week, I wrote about the USPS not being good at email. More recently, I ran into a similarly poor notification from sandwich-maker Jimmy John’s:

We’ll set aside the rude instruction to “Come & Get it!”, because that’s in line with Jimmy John’s slightly odd brand. Note the times for these two messages, however. I placed the order at 6:08 PM, and I was told it was ready for pickup at 9:18 PM. That is not exactly “freaky fast”, nor any kind of fast at all.

Fortunately, this order did not in fact take 3 hours and 10 minutes to make. I picked it up around 6:20 PM, and I was enjoying it at home a few minutes later. In fact, when I received this notification, I thought “I just ate my sandwich, and it’s in my stomach right now”.

I don’t know if this was another slow computer server, or if someone simply forgot to tap the “Order Ready” button on the screen. Alternately, it’s also possible an entire second order was prepared, and that an identical copy of my sandwich sat there, lonely and unloved. That might be the saddest possibility of all.

This past Saturday, while on a run, I saw a woman wearing a shirt that simply said “Sept 21” on the front. As I ran past, I turned around to see if there was anything else on the back, but it was blank. I remembered that Saturday was indeed the 21st of September, so I was obviously forced to assume that this woman owned 366 shirts, and she wore each of them on their specific day of the year.¹ While this seemed a rather inefficient way of remembering the current date, literally nothing else made sense.

Bizarrely, however, this rational and logical conclusion was actually (most likely) incorrect. It turns out that in 2016, comedian Demi Adejuyigbe turned September 21 into the best new holiday in ages, and he’s been doing fabulous work promoting it ever since.² That year, he posted his first video set to an edited version of Earth, Wind & Fire’s song “September”.³

If you need a pick-me-up of any sort, that 66 seconds is pure bliss. In that video, you’ll also spot the original shirt design, apparently made just minutes before the video with a stencil and a marker. This is essentially what the woman I saw had as well. It makes a lot more sense here, with a soundtrack, rather than in a vacuum.

By September 21, 2017, the world seemed a much darker place than it had just a year earlier. Still, Adejuyigbe returned, trying to fight back the gathering horror.⁴ We now had two full minutes of September 21st-related goofiness, just when we needed it most.

The festivities continued, and indeed grew larger, in 2018. That year’s video featured a body double, a tear-away jacket, and a children’s choir.⁵ It also included my very favorite moment, a brief mention of “December”, followed by an immediate course correction back to September.

This year, we got a marvelous single shot video, including a mariachi band and some hilarious video editing to place Adejuyigbe into the original Earth, Wind & Fire video.⁶ It continues to be tremendous fun. We now have over four full minutes of delightfulness, which is longer than the original song. Wonderful!

While I came late to this party, I’m fully on board now, and eagerly looking forward to September 21, 2020.⁷ If you want to get into the holiday spirit yourself, you can purchase your own confusing t-shirt. Since 2018, Adejuyigbe has sold September 21 t-shirts to raise funds for some very worthy charities. It’s too late to use such a shirt properly in 2019, but the next September 21 is getting closer all the time. Personally, I can’t wait to celebrate in slightly less than a year.

Footnotes:

1. That February 29th shirt is really not getting much use. ↩︎

2. Adejuyigbe is surely best known for his work in Sandwich Video’s tremendous “How to Vote” project. ↩︎

3. The 2016 video is archived here. ↩︎

4. The 2017 video is archived here. ↩︎

5. The 2018 video is archived here. ↩︎

6. The 2019 video is archived here. ↩︎

7. Also, November 3rd, 2020. ↩︎

Out here on the Information Superhighway, it’s possible to do all manner of amazing things. You can get directions to almost anywhere, purchase just about anything, and even pay your condo fees online. Wow!

Recently, the management company for my condo association updated their website. Here, in all its glory, is their new-for-2019 login page:

Let’s ignore the fact that this page is using the word “portal”, because I want to focus on what really caught my eye:

It’s a small detail, of course, but capitalizing email as “eMail” feels like a throwback to about 1991. Wikipedia currently identifies five different ways of referring to email, and “eMail” doesn’t even make that overly comprehensive list. Heck, even a dash between “e” and “mail” has been out of style for years.

Still, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this was the signature on the email announcing the new login page:

Ah yes, I can really hear the sincerity of this eMail.

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to find the USPS’s “Star Ribbon” stamp designed by Aaron Draplin. I looked for it in multiple local post offices, and when I was traveling, I’d check in at their post office as well. Each and every time I was met with blank stares and a complete lack of knowledge about this product.

Eventually, I decided to place an order via the USPS website.¹ This process was fast and easy, and I didn’t have to talk to anyone at all. To top it off, the shipping rate was a measly $1.30, and I’d easily pay much more than that to avoid another trip to the post office. I ordered on August 1st and quickly got an email receipt with a status of “Order Placed”. Just four days later, on August 5th, I received my stamps. They actually shipped via Priority Mail, which should cost about $7, so the Post Office is cutting themselves some kind of deal on shipping. I suppose they can get away with that.

Hey, Good Lookin’
[Photo courtesy of P. Kafasis]

As you can see, I had my stamps, and I was pleased. I also assumed our transaction was complete. As such, I was quite surprised to wake up a full 12 days later to email from the USPS:

Yes, on August 17th, I received a notice via email that my order had shipped. I was very much aware of that, as I’d received the package almost two weeks prior.

I really can’t fathom what happened here. Is this how their system always works? That would be preposterous, and yet, not out of the realm of possibility. Worth mentioning, I actually received two identical copies of this email. That may point to a server issue which got overzealously corrected days later. Regardless of how or why this email was sent, though, it was more than a little confusing.

Perhaps because of this sort of thing, the email includes this footer:

That’s quite a catch-all at the end there:

Any other use of the email by you is prohibited.

I imagine “sharing this email to mock the post office’s bizarre handling of online ordering” might fall under that prohibited use, huh? Well, I hope you’ll all visit me in mail jail.

Previously in strange USPS status tracking: Make a Copy for Yourselves Too

Footnotes:

1. As I write this, only coils of 3,000 or 10,000 stamps are available, for thousands of dollars each. Fortunately, when I ordered, it was possible to buy sheets of 20.↩︎