Please Mr(Ms?) Post Man!

I'm a celebrity gossip whore. I'll admit it. I'm really trying to get better. I completely stopped visiting websites by a certain Queen of All Media when I started to find his posts less about gossip and more about relentless bullying of, well. . .just about anybody. I occasionally find myself wandering over to Pink Is the New Blog as I find his gossip refreshing and not bullying at all. Plus, Trent blogs about his life which I find interesting and he is extremely gracious and real; something that is often lost in LaLa Land.

I used to, every Thursday at lunch, make my way to Target to pick up the Triumvirate of weekly magazines (US Weekly, People and InTouch) when it dawned on me that I could save a LOT of money if I just subscribed to the blasted magazines. Who was I kidding, I was hooked. For the longest time, it was perfect. I'd arrive home on Thursday, snuggle in after dinner and read all the celebrity news fit to print.

Then a strange thing started to happen. I'd get two magazines on Thursday and one on Friday, maybe Saturday. Then one week I'd get People on Monday, US Weekly on Saturday and then nothing. Worried that maybe my magazine slipped between boxes or accidentally went to a neighbor (it's happened before), I'd find myself in Target or the grocery store picking up InTouch. But then on Wednesday the prior weeks InTouch would end up in my mailbox.

I found it odd though, that I was getting my magazines (and really, it rotated each week) nearly a week after publication date and the day before the next issue would hit the news stands. I pay for a subscription to save money and to get them on or before the date they hit the news stands. And now, I'm spending more money to replace the missing magazine. So out of curiosity I called Customer Service of each magazine. Each time, I was told the same story. They try their best to ship their issues as close to newsstand date as possible and that a one to two day delay can be expected but a week was completely out of the ordinary and should not be happening. Because, really, who wants to read week old news?

I suspected that perhaps my mail carrier or someone in the sorting line was perusing reading my magazines. Looking back, I've lost complete issues of monthly magazines and had to buy from the news stand or gotten copies that were so tattered and had complete pages missing or even pages dogeared.

Today, I found what I suspected, that I was in fact not the first reader of my magazines. As I was reading US Weekly, addressed to me, I happened upon a phone number written in red pen on one of the pages. At first I thought maybe this was something that is printed as part of the article. As I looked closer you could see the indentation from writing on the page behind it. I am LIVID.

Who the fuck do they think they are, stealing my mail?! If you're too cheap to buy the damn magazines - go to the fucking library. Hell, you can even have mine on Friday - AFTER I've read them first. Yes, in the end I get my magazines. But they're MINE, I don't want to read them a week late after you've gone through them. If you're doing that to my magazines, what else are you looking at?

So, added to my Monday To-Do List includes a call to the Post Master. Do I think they'll actually do something? Probably not, since there's no way to tell where in the process this borrowing theft occurs. But maybe this complaint will at least result in a little bit more monitoring and the timely delivery of my mail.