Shelbyville and Columbia are approximately 43 miles apart.

One letter I sent to Columbia from here on April 14 arrived at its destination April 24. The other, sent the same day at the same time to the same location, found its way to the same designated address April 26.

I could have walked the letters to Columbia quicker than that.

Talk about snail mail. If I had given the letters to a snail, it would have been quicker than placing them in the mail.

I am told this is not uncommon. But it caused me and the business I was dealing with more than our share of confusion and frustration.

Certainly, it is nowhere close to a letter written in 1931 in Maine that did not arrive at an address in the same state until 2014. In those 83 years the designated recipient of the letter had passed away and it was delivered to her niece.

The U.S. Postal Service is on track to raise the price of a first-class stamp from 63 cents to 66 cents. In January it was raised from 60 cents to 63 cents. If approved the new price would go into effect in July. The approval would mean the cost of a first-class stamp will have been raised by 32 percent over the last four years.

The logical thought process would be that with a higher cost for a service the more efficient that service would be.

Guess not.

I know there is email and instant messaging among a myriad of ways to pass along information. But sometimes you need snail mail to send an item like a cashier’s check or a thank you note that is so important that it needs to be handwritten rather than typed out on a computer.

It makes you wonder what Ben Franklin, the highly quotable first postmaster of the United States, would say about the state of today’s delivery woes.

The circulation department here at the Times-Gazette deals with questions about mail delivery all the time. A high average would be five-to-10 complaints per week. They can track the address label. Most of the time the newspapers were mailed to subscribers in a timely manner. So, when your paper arrives late, or doesn’t arrive at all, it is not their fault.

There are many dedicated and efficient workers at our local post office. Like us, they do their best to make sure mail arrives in a timely manner. But all we can do is send our correspondence along their way and hope they don’t get lost in the process. At least not for 83 years.