Driver License

Two months after I passed the road test, I received my new driver license in my mail box, finally.
Yes, two months. If you send a parcel from China to the US by sea, it would have already arrived too. So whom to blame? There are only two parties involved in this send-deliver process: the Department of Motor Vehicles and USPS. DMV claimed that they sent out my license shortly after the road test, that is, before Christmas last year. And online delivery status shows that the letter containing my license was returned as 'undeliverable' to DMV by USPS. Hence, it has been sitting at DMV until I called last week. For a moment I was wondering if I had put the address wrong, but wait, my Learner Permit was delivered successfully with exactly the same address. So do tons of other daily junk mail. Determined to find out what has gone wrong, I examined my mailbox in utter details. Oh, here it is: the number tag on my mailbox is missing. However, my mailbox sits along with all the neighboring ones in a row, and apparently the numbers are arranged in order. The one before mine is 4A, and the one after is 4C. And, each apartment DOES have one mailbox. By now, anyone reading this will have concluded correctly that my mailbox is 4B because one thing that differentiates human beings from machines is the ability to inference. (Well, technically speaking, machines nowadays can do some sort of inferencing as well.) And, this is an absolutely EASY inferencing problem. You don't even need the 'fancy' Bayesian rule ... So that leads me to the following conclusion: USPS has switched to such an advanced delivering system that they are now using machines (albeit with bugs) to do the job. Period.