Daniel MacIsaac
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jun 04/99) - Yellowknife resident Elizabeth Noel is p.o.'d with the P.O.

Or, to put it another way, the Yellowknife resident is upset with the post office -- for losing two parcels containing hand-made dresses.

Noel's encounter with Canada Post began some eight weeks ago, on April 9, when she mailed two packages from the main Yellowknife post office.

The parcels contained dresses she'd made for her nieces -- aged four and five -- out of material patterned with school scenes in preparation for their kindergarten debuts this fall.

But Noel said the dresses never made it to their destinations -- Mount Pearl, Nfld., and Dartmouth, N.S.

When the parcels hadn't been received after five weeks, she called the Yellowknife post office and was given a 1-800 number in Winnipeg to call.

"A gentleman there said they would refund me the postage money, $11," she said. "and I said, 'That's not the point.'"

Noel said that she's been wrestling post office bureaucracy ever since. She said she was advised to tell the Yellowknife office to do a search in case the packages had been mislaid -- but received a rude, abrupt reply for her trouble.

She said that when she called back the 1-800 number to see what progress had been made in tracking the parcels, she was told the man who had taken down her complaint had got in trouble because it wasn't his job to do so, but that was not all.

"The woman said the computer entry with my information had been deleted somehow," said Noel.

She has a hard time understanding how two packages mailed on the same day, from the same station could both have disappeared.

Teresa Williams, a Canada Post spokeswoman in Edmonton, tried to place the situation in context.

"In Edmonton we process about a million pieces of mail a day," she said. "We deal with billions of pieces of mail each year and the percentage of lost items is really very small."

Williams said certain aspects of mail delivery are simply beyond Canada Post's control.

"In reality a lot of people handle the mail who aren't necessarily Canada Post employees -- on airplanes or on trains or railyard attendants," she said.

Williams advised that Noel should not lose hope, saying the dresses might yet end up at Canada Post's undeliverable mail centre in Scarborough, Ont.

Noel, however, said she holds little hope for a happy conclusion. She said she won't have the chance to make new dresses by September and isn't comforted by reports of postcards and letters being received decades after they've been mailed.

"I want my nieces to wear the dresses while they're still little girls," she said, "not to get them after they've grown up.