So they tossed it in the dead letter bin and figured George would get to it.
Then George quit and it was now Fred's responsibility. Fred got promoted and now Gertrude had to take care of it.
Gertrude moved away and Irene got the dead letter responsibility. It was now 1959.
Irene died and Nathan took over dead letters. Nathan was lazy dead didn't do anything for ten years. Then Nathan became postmaster and appointed
Cedric to handle it. By now it was 1971 and Cedric said "That ain't my job" and ignored it for another ten years.
In 1981, Cedric asked Gwendolyn to handle it and she told him "Get stuffed -- ain't my job."
That brought us to 2003 when Gwendolyn became Postmaster General of the USPS. By then, with a PO full generation of AA hires, nothing got done. Everybody just forgot about the letter.
But, who did they finally hire that went through the dead letter bin and found it? That's the big mystery.
A local Post Office was being remodeled and when they took out the old radiators they found letters behind them that had been lost for years.............
Decades ago, my family received (in June) a Christmas card from one of my aunts, which had been postmarked several years prior its arrival at our house.
The envelope was stamped “Found in Supposedly Empty Equipment”.
Stamped.
Not handwritten.
Let the implications of that sink in ...
Courtesy of “Old Mail Day” (Green Acres reference)...