And now to address this week’s 20 thousand dollar question. What’s going on with the mail? We don’t know and it’s like pulling teeth to find out. While we have enjoyed our working relationship with the post office, the week of January 12-19 and several days beyond that has not only been an absolute nightmare, but something we cannot continue to tolerate going forward. At our last Captain’s Meeting, we discussed going fully electronic at some point, and unless the post office improves upon last week, it appears we will be going electronic sooner rather than later. We are giving this another week or two to see where we are, and we deeply apologize to all of our teams for the delays from the post office, both in delivery to your doorstep and to our PO Box. While we have been in touch with several people at the post office, none have been able to explain what happened. When we first thought about trying out the postal service 11 years ago, we tested the speed to which mail got from our Post Office to mailboxes all over the county. Mostly, everyone got their mail the very next day, and as many of you know, the post office continued delivering the very next day MOST of the time, except around holidays. Due to our processing and mailing schedules, and the necessity of updating stats to our web site, this problem needs to be addressed and fixed by the post office immediately, and if not, we will need to change what we are doing. Anything more than 2 day turnaround time is not good enough.
What does the previous paragraph mean to each of our teams? If we do end up going electronic, we will be going fully electronic. If we move away from the post office, we will be doing so almost exclusively. While we will still mail out new Team Captain’s packets and random stuff that we need our members to receive, weekly score sheets will need to be downloaded from our web site and then some form of scan or photograph of your score sheet will need to be emailed back to the league office. We will also be setting up online payment options, which will please a large percentage of our league members. We will still accept mailed in score sheets and payments, but if the post office is not going to be able to get stuff to us for 4 or 5 days instead of the 1 or 2 days we’ve been accustomed to, you might need to carry a team credit to cover the cost of your fees for that week, so that your submission doesn’t end up being late. We will not be supplying postage paid return envelopes anymore, obviously, since we won’t be mailing score sheets. We know that some of our captains may not have internet and a printer or a bank account (we receive money order payments from some of our captains) to do online transactions, and that’s fine, but you may need to find someone on your team to print the weekly score sheet for you. When we set up online banking, we will provide options that will not require you to pay any transaction fees, although not every option we provide will we be able to do that for you. The goal is to make this a smooth transition and one that improves timely submission of our score sheets.
So, we are asking for a show of hands, does your team (at least one player on your team) have the technological ability to print score sheets off of our web site, scan or photograph (yes, even with a cell phone) and email the score sheet to the league office and then make an online payment for league fees? Please write that you do or do not have someone that can do this on the bottom of this week’s score sheet. Thanks and again, our apologies for the recent postal inconveniences.