I spoke with Fred this morning at the post office and we spoke about ways to make the number change less painful for the community as a whole.
This is what we are going to work towards:
1. If you haven’t yet given people your new box number (ie: changed your mailing address), please wait. We maybe able to come up with a better, less onerous solution. If you have, don’t worry about. It is already registered with Fred.
2. What we would ideally like to do is to have the hyphen dropped from your number and go with that number (ie: 14-8 moves to 148). However, there are some parameters around this and some boxes will not be so easily switched over, but for the majority of people it should work. If when you take out the hyphen, your box number is between 1-300 (ie: 4-6 become 46, and 15-9 becomes 159), it looks like it will work. However, there are a small number of people who have with different number, 6-10 or 12-14 just to randomly give examples, who will not work and will need to change to fit into a 1-300 number at some point (but waits please).
3. We have a bit of time to fix this before the new boxes arrive in a couple of months, and you can still use your old hyphened number until that happens. If you have done a swap with someone, please know that nothing is changed, until it is changed with Fred. He is willing to work with us to make this as painless as possible. Instead of individual swapping, we might be able to do something larger that could help more people out and save lots of headache, time, and lost mail. Also, maybe we could just give Fred the info all at once.
Again, if you haven’t changed your address to the new assigned one on you mailbox sticky, please wait and let’s see if we can work for an easier solution for the community. Also, if you know of someone who might not see this espokes, maybe let them know not to change theirs yet either.
Clearly, there will be more information to come on this as we work for something more doable.
Thank you in advance,
Michelle Black