EAST GWILLIMBURY, ON — “It’s trying to convince those dumbasses at the post office that they’ve got [the mail] and you haven’t,” Dick Mahoney says. 

Mahoney, the owner of RBM Carriers based in East Gwillimbury, ON, had been waiting for eight cheques, totaling $34,000, since December, 2011.

They arrived Tuesday. 

And the ordeal, an exasperated Mahoney told TodaysTrucking.com, has taught him some valuable lessons.

Lesson number one: You can trust your good customers. Mahoney said when he first realized the cheques were slightly late, he began calling his customers to find out what was going. In every case, he got paid—well before this very late batch of mail arrived. 

Mahoney says relationships with his regular customers stayed the same.

“If they say it’s in the mail, it’s in the mail.”

But it was the one-time customers he started to question. A few of those one-off relationships are no more.

And don’t even get him started on the post office.

“I call the post office once a week and say ‘Am I getting mail today?’ — because you need a cash flow everyday in the trucking business for your fuel — and they say, ‘Oh, well [the postman is] off today’ or ‘I don’t know. We think he’s gone.’ The less I have to do with them the happier I am.”

And with that, here’s another lesson learned: “The more people we can get on direct deposit and electronic bank the better,” he says. “Most of our invoicing now is done by email or fax, so you’ve just got to bypass the post office.” 

“Everybody thinks it’s pretty horrendous. They say ‘Oh the post office is terrible, but there’s nothing you can do about it’ and I say there is. I’ve never been somebody just to lay back and let somebody take advantage of me.”