On one of the busiest days of the year for post offices across the country, staff at Buffalo Grove Post Office still made time to go above and beyond to help a patron with a unique problem.
On April 18 – aka Tax Day – Buffalo Grove resident Danielle McKinley drove up to the Buffalo Grove Post Office’s outdoor drop-off box to send some bills. McKinley has a handicap-parking marker because of the strain 40 years of working in a dentist’s office in Lake Zurich put on her back, but she leaves it on her passenger seat while driving.
“I don’t like to have it hanging on the rear-view mirror, because it gets in the way,” she said. “Some people like to have a bunch of things hanging there, but I was never one of those people.”
She did not notice that, as she grabbed her stack of bills, she grabbed the placard underneath them as well. Into an especially stuffed outbox went the parking pass she uses nearly every day. McKinley moved on to her next destination – her pedicurist – where she realized her error as she went to park.
After her pedicure was over, around 2 p.m., McKinley scrambled back to the post office, where she met post office supervisor Sandi Lambert and explained her dilemma. Lambert knew McKinley’s marker was still in her station (the day’s first delivery truck does not come until 1:30 p.m., and it only picks up the overnight load), but had no idea exactly where to look for it. And the 3:30 truck was coming, plus the 4 p.m. priority pickup and then the 5:30 last-call driver – and none of them were going to be able to stop their runs, hop out of their vehicles and help in the search for a single handicap parking pass.
“She said ‘Oh, you know, I don’t know if we’ll be able to find it,'” McKinley recalled of her conversation with Lambert.
But Lambert’s staff did find it, and in the days since, McKinley has been making her usual trips around town with greater appreciation for up-front parking.
“I’m old, worn out,” the 86-year-old native of France said.
Lambert explained what was happening to her parking pass that afternoon: the still-by-hand sorting that her staff does to get Buffalo Grove’s mail on one of the delivery trucks to the postal hub in Palatine. Her clerks check the first three digits of every parcel and letter’s destination ZIP code, and place it in one of the dozens of containers with the matching three digits – one container for every major postal zone in the US.
And on a day when scores of procrastinating Americans finally get around to dumping their tax returns on Lambert and her group, the prospects of finding this handicap parking pass weren’t exactly promising.
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“I had to go through all this mail to look for that sticker,” Lambert said. “It was buried under a whole lot of mail.”
Still, she gave her staff a heads up, and they started looking out for a bright blue piece of plastic amid all the standard mail. Back at her house, McKinley fretted about the paperwork getting one of those pieces of plastic requires: the form from the township, finding a doctor who will agree to sign that form, mailing it to Springfield and waiting.
By 5 p.m., the last-call truck was inbound; if McKinley’s parking pass was not already on the move, it would be soon. But then, Lambert heard a yell from post office worker Bipen Patel.
Reaching up from a pile of outbound letters, Patel held McKinley’s parking pass in his hand.
“I go ‘Yes!'” Lambert recalled.
She called McKinley at 6, after the busy day’s final delivery truck was loaded and moving.
“Oh, I was so pleased,” McKinley said. “That was very nice of them.”
Twitter @RonnieAtPioneer