I'll probably suggest some solutions to these one of these days, but for now I'm just griping. (The Great Ranking Of Problems.)

In all the talk about whether or not to deliver mail on Saturdays, two important points are being forgotten about.

First, where is my Entertainment Weekly this week? It usually comes on Saturdays, but then it was coming on Fridays, and now here it is Wednesday and I still haven't gotten the latest one, which makes me wonder whether my subscription ran out or not -- I can't tell, because I don't remember when I last renewed it, and I don't remember how long I renewed it for the last time I renewed it.

I tried, once, to tackle the problem of constantly being asked to renew my subscriptions when it occurred to me that it was a problem: Sweetie and I were always renewing our newspaper subscription until one day I said "Wait a minute, didn't we just do this?" So we checked into it and realized that we were subscribed for about 3 years ahead; they'd just kept sending us renewal notices and we'd kept renewing without ever bothering to ask when does this subscription expire?

To avoid oversubscribing, I started keeping track of when my subscriptions were going to run out, using the Outlook reminder on my work computer... but then our firm switched over to a different calendar system and I never used Outlook anymore, so now I'm back to not knowing when my subscriptions run out, making me wonder whether the mailman stole my EW or if I'm simply out of subscription.

Which all now dwarfs what I was going to say was the real problem for today, which is mail delivered at the wrong time of the day. I get my mail at the office at around 11 a.m., which is not good for me. It's usually when I'm in the middle of something else, and the mail then distracts me from whatever I was working on as I focus on whatever annoying thing I've gotten from some annoying lawyer in the mail.

At my old office, years ago, the mail was worse: It came about 4:00, which is way too late. At 4:00, there's nothing you can do about annoying mail except fret about it overnight; so I used to simply go get my mail the next morning, instead, picking it up about 9 a.m., giving me the whole day to deal with whatever was in it, and doing so before I got wrapped up in anything else.

So, officially, that's two problems for today: Uncertainty over how long my magazine subscription lasts, and Mail delivered at the wrong time. I'll slot them in at numbers 8,766, and 103, respectively:

Prior entries on The Great Ranking Of Problems:

72. The pen ran dry midway through my signature (legal documents)

76: Family members imposing their diets on me

99: Spousal PB&J Incompatibility.

103. Mail being delivered at the wrong time of the day.

173: Preshoveling & reshoveling snow.
...

212:: What to do about stuff I was going to buy but then it broke in the store and now I still want to buy the stuff but I don't want to buy something that was broken?

413: Guilt Over Meanness To Sentient Paperclips
. . .
502: Having to wait forever, seemingly, for Italian food to cool down.
. . .
721: Printer not holding a lot of paper at once.
...
2,624: Unidentifiable Mystery Song Stuck In Head.
...
5,000: Lopsided Nail Clipping.
...
7,399: Potato(E?)s?

. . .

8.766: Uncertainty over how long my magazine subscriptions last.

13,334: The pen ran dry midway through my signature (signing stuff that doesn't really matter at all, so why am I signing it?)

14,452: Worrying that there's too much peanut brittle leftover to eat before it goes bad.
...
15,451: Almost napping.
...
22,372: Having hair which isn't quite a definable color.
22,373: Having too many songs on an iPod