It doesn’t happen often but we will periodically get a damaged envelope from the US Postal Service wrapped in plastic with a “Sorry we really mangled your letter” note.  With the volume that they deal with each day, I don’t mind getting these every once in a while as long as they’re bills and not something important like a 401K rollover check.

One of these mangled items came in the mail Saturday.  It was our GEICO bill so I wasn’t worried about it and didn’t open up the plastic bag it came in.  When we finally opened it up Monday morning, the overwhelming stench of gasoline was emanating from the bag.  I put the envelope to my nose and there was no mistaking that this one had been dropped in a puddle of gasoline.  So I guess the question is where was the puddle of gasoline in the USPS delivery system?  Was it in the warehouse?  That’s a scary thought.  Did the carrier drop it one day and returned it the next with the bag around it?  How many other items were dropped in this puddle, making it the most flammable-prone delivery ever?

An amusing side note to this is that there was that our cell phone bill came in the mail the same day.  The fumes seeped through the hazmat bag they put on the damaged envelope and made our T-Mobile bill just as fragrant.  Since my company reimburses part of my cell phone bill, I have to turn in the original bill in when I’m handing in my expense report.  The invoice smelled like a Shell gas station on a hot summer day so I put the bill in a Ziploc bag and didn’t open it up until right before I turned it in to accounting.  They’re probably wondering why their cube smells like 89-octane fuel.