There are all kinds of reasons why the post office may not be able to deliver your package today: maybe it requires a signature and you’re not home. Maybe the post office can’t get access to your apartment building, or can’t get in the gate. Or your mail carrier ran away because your home is apparently guarded by a bear.

That happened to one Canadian homeowner, and this did not exactly happen in the Yukon. It was near Vancouver, that city that kind of looks like the setting of every cable sci-fi series. Bears have been wandering into rural and suburban areas across North America, though, and the story generally doesn’t end well for the bears.

The saga began with this bemused tweet:

He wasn’t complaining, mind you. The man told the Huffington Post and other news outlets that bears wander through his neighborhood often. He wouldn’t even elaborate on what was in the package or have the postal service investigate the incident further, in order to protect the postal worker.

Of course, this is what I keep picturing whenever I think about this story.

Wait a minute, most of our readers are saying. If there was a bear at the door of this guy’s house, where did the postal worker leave the note? That’s because the majority of our readers are American, and our mailboxes are generally attached to our houses or apartment buildings. That’s not the case in Canada, where individual mailboxes have given way to community mailboxes, or CMBs: a row of locked mailboxes for everyone in the neighbo(u)rhood, even in relatively dense urban areas. Canada Post has adopted this as a money-saving measure, and the U.S. Postal Service is considering doing the same.

Packages, of course, would still go to postal customers’ doorsteps. Unless there’s a bear.

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