By five o’clock most mornings the papers are out there, right where they should be, all three of them. This morning they weren’t. Although all three are delivered by carriers for the local daily, each missing paper must be recorded in each publisher’s system.

There’s a deadline for this if same-day redelivery is to occur. The deadline was met. A quick noon-hour trip home to pick up the redelivered papers was useless. As the lunch hour wore on, papers were delivered across the street but not to us. A call to the circulation office of the local daily elicited the information that papers would still be delivered. The responder could, however, confirm only reports entered for two missing papers, not for the third one. Furthermore, she said that all three should have been reported to the local daily and that I was very much mistaken if I had ever understood otherwise. I asked when the policy had changed and was told in no uncertain terms that there had never been any such policy.

I called paper number three. In that paper’s system the time of the “missing” report was entered, at exactly the time when it was made. The responder couldn’t understand why the local daily’s system didn’t show it. A second call to the local daily got a sort of “we don’t believe you” response and a “too bad” response and a “you’re too late” response and “there’s nothing we can do but we’ll give a credit” response.

I called paper number three again and spoke to a different operative. She said she’d take care of it, no matter what, and that, despite any refusals or anything said by the people at the local daily, the papers will be delivered today and to call her by a certain time if for any reason they’re not so that she can follow up and ensure that they will be delivered today, no matter what, even if it’s outside the hours in which the local daily says it can be done. We shall see.

Update: Despite the repeated protestations of impossibility, all three newspapers had been delivered by suppertime. A neighbor reported that they were dropped at about 2:30 pm or so, nearly three hours later than the delivery of two across the street. The subscription term of two of the papers has been extended gratis.