Just When It Counted

 

A.I. generated photo of the USPS losing my mail in the style of Dali

My last grandparent passed away this summer and because she happened to be my maternal grandmother and my mother is also deceased, I received a 25% share of my grandmother's estate. Her estate was almost entirely in an Edward Jones account and her financial adviser is doing a fine job of dividing up the assets between my uncle, brother and I. But it hasn't been without a couple hiccups along the way.

Many of the assets were life insurance policies rolled over under an annuity umbrella. Now that the time has come to collect on these policies, I've been surprised at hour forthright the insurance companies have been in notifying us of policies but how difficult it has been to get an actual check sent. 

Despite a will, executor and the controlling entity of one of the policies, Edward Jones, dictating that the check be made out to the estate and sent to the Edward Jones office dividing up said estate, the insurance agency made the check out to the three beneficiaries directly. We can't cash these checks directly as they are bound in an estate that hasn't been settled yet so the only solution was to endorse the very large checks and mail them back to Edward Jones, in another state. It made me nervous relying on the USPS system to safely deliver these checks but they did.

Another insurance agency dictated that the will, made up 50 years ago, doesn't meet modern standards anymore and so won't divide up the policy as it stated. Unfortunately, the only beneficiary listed was my grandfather who died four years previously. So we are forced to go through probate and give lawyers a large share of the proceeds before we can collect on that.

Finally, yet another insurance agency notified us of an unknown about policy. Both my uncle and brother received letters in the mail with details on how to collect. Several days went by and still my letter did not show up. Finally this past Saturday, my USPS informed delivery service, a free service you can sign up for that sends you an email with a scanned image of every piece you are supposed to be delivered later in the day, showed that I had a letter arriving in that day's mail from the same insurance agency. Not mail was ever delivered. I thought that perhaps they delivery person just ran out of time and it would show up in Monday's mail. It didn't. The service gives you a click box to say you didn't receive the mail but when you expand the details of what that means, it just means you give permission for federal law agencies to use the missing piece of mail in any fraud investigations dealing with mail tampering, i.e. I won't hear anything more from the USPS or government on the subject.

So after months of junk mail I don't want to receive, the USPS has lost the single piece of mail that meant something to me and the likelihood I'll see it is slim to none. I suppose I could start dialing phone numbers leading to robotic voices telling me how much I mean to them before making me wait hours to talk to a human who just reads pre-written script from a computer screen that can't solve my problem. But I'm not going to. In this case, I'm fortunate that the Edward Jones guy has all the information he needs to send in a claim on my behalf, and that of my uncle and brother too, so the letter would have just been added to a folder of evidence I have made on my grandmother's estate should I need to refer to it in the near future. 

Some I talk to lament about how tragic it would be for the USPS just close up shop and become an antiquated story we tell our grandchildren. I am not one of those people.