About building community

We’re chalking this one up to 2020.

Whatever we did to deserve this year, it must have been bad, because we’re paying for it now.

This last week kind of was the icing on the cake for what has been the craziest of years.

We’ve been hit with a pandemic but that pales in comparison to what happened to us. OK, that’s an exaggeration. It’s not that big of a deal in the whole scheme of things, but coupled with a lot of people on edge, it made for an interesting week.

And, we’re sorry if we caused confusion that made your 2020 even worse.

On top of being forced to wear mask – wait, I’m not supposed to bring that up. I’ve been told that it’s wrong to bring up the mask mandate, and we need to all support it. I’m supporting it, as much as I can. I’m all for wearing masks if it will continue to keep businesses open. If they would have forced us to do this in March rather than shut down the economy, maybe this would all be behind us now, but they were telling us not to wear masks then. So, I’m not being critical of the mask mandate, but it is, indeed, a mandate.

But that was the least of our problem last week. Something much bigger happened: If you looked at your hometown newspaper last week, chances are the name above your address was wrong on it. Chalk it up to a computer glitch somewhere in cyberspace, but we mailed out thousands of newspapers last week to the right addresses and the wrong person.

Lots and lots of you noticed. We literally took hundreds of phone calls.

Now this was a once in a lifetime occurrence. This was like winning the lottery, only you got a newspaper with someone else’s name on it and not any money. And like winning the lottery, it’s only going to happen once. We aren’t going to hit this kind of a jackpot again.

Last Wednesday afternoon, after we were dropping newspapers at local post offices for delivery, a postmaster pointed out that the names and addresses on one of the routes didn’t seem to match up. In fact, they were all completely wrong.

“We’ll deliver these, but you’re going to get some phone calls,” he said.

He was right. We thought of making this just one huge community building exercise. What if the person who gets the paper has to reach out to the person whose name is on it and gets to know that person?

One woman called telling me that another woman’s name was on her paper. “If that’s my husband’s girlfriend, tell her she can have him,” she joked.

Once the dust settles and the papers have arrived, we’ll do everything we can on our end to make sure it’s your name on your paper – from now on!

And on another note, we realize there has been a significant slowdown in United States Postal Service delivery in some areas. We’re going to do everything on our end to make sure to serve you better. We’re taking the initiative to move as much of the mail as we can ourselves from now on.

We do appreciate the work of our local postal employees. We rely on them for our livelihood, and we know they’ve been going through a lot this year. They’re hard workers. Some of them went the extra mile and crossed out the wrong names last week on the papers on their routes.

In the whole scheme of things, having the wrong name on your newspaper wasn’t maybe that big of a deal. But we’re sorry we added to everything else 2020 is throwing at you.

McLoone