Post Office Demands ID & Signature from Dog To Deliver Package
Ever tried to do something nice for someone else, with unintended results? Maybe you’re familiar with that famous snippet of verse from Scottish poet Robert Burns.
“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” he wrote back in 1785. Evidently, dogs aren’t totally immune from these types of headaches either.
Take Chaya, for example. She’s an easygoing Rottweiler-Boxer mix who lives in Sweden with her owner, Marie Palmgren.
Turns out a family friend living abroad recently decided to send Chaya a lovely gift. This friend figured that addressing the package to Chaya herself would be an extra-adorable touch.
Sounds pretty reasonable. Except that postal bureaucracy intervened in a big, big way.
Once the parcel arrived, Palmgren received a brief note from her mail carrier. It said she needed to pick up this particular package at the post office.
So Palmgren stopped by, assuming the errand would take only a few minutes at most. She didn’t notice that the package was specifically addressed to Chaya until she’d stepped up to the counter.
“I asked them how I should fill out the form,” she told Swedish news outlet Aftonbladet. “It said on the notice that the addressee needed to sign and show an ID.”
Palmgren was probably expecting an amused chuckle. After all, as she explained to postal officials, the sender had written the name “Chaya Palmgren” on the address label “just for fun.”
But The Dodo reported that even after learning Chaya was a bona fide animal companion, postal employees insisted on following standard protocol.
“They still demanded an ID and a signature from Chaya,” Palmgren noted. They also wanted similar credentials from Palmgren herself, since they considered her an assigned representative retrieving the package.
Utterly stunned by this unanticipated turn of events, Palmgren headed back home. There, she rifled through old papers until she found documentation stating that Chaya was, indeed, her loyal pet.
Then she coaxed Chaya into the car and made a beeline back to the post office with this certification in hand.
Unfortunately, that still wasn’t enough for the super-vigilant postal team. “They told me that they accepted the document as Chaya’s ID,” Palmgren explained, “but they still needed her to sign.”
So an employee started hunting around for an ink pad. Meanwhile, Chaya was required to wait outside due to a strict “no pets on the premises” policy.
Of course, there were probably a few giggles or embarrassed shoulder-shrugs at this point, right? According to Palmgren, not even close.
“The staff was very serious all the time,” Palmgren said. “It wasn’t like a funny thing for them.”
Ultimately, Palmgren was asked to place Chaya’s actual paw print beside her own human signature on the notice. As you may have guessed, a video of these astonishing proceedings has quickly gone viral.
There’s been no word from Chaya about her private pooch take on all this. But Palmgren describes her own reaction as “totally flabbergasted.”
“When I reached the car, I laughed so much that I got a pain in my stomach,” she recalled.
The gift-sender expressed extreme mortification about all the trouble this sweet little detail had caused. But Palmgren reassured her thoughtful friend.
First, Palmgren was quick to note that Chaya loved her brand new water fountain toy. She also reminded her pal that “you managed to make so many people laugh!”
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