We've been going through hell for the past few weeks as it's become ever clearer that we're the victims of a massive postal screwup.

This only affects our subscribers who are not in the United States and Canada. According to postal officials, all of the issues we were sending overseas simply vanished while in their care. They honestly have no idea what they did with them. All they will tell us is that they're "somewhere in the system."

The real kicker is what they expect us to do now. Apparently it's the policy of the United States Postal Service to not take any responsibility whatsoever when something like this happens. They're telling us to simply do the mailing again and pay them a second time, something which would cost us thousands of dollars.

Clearly there's a double standard at work here. Larger magazines are not treated this way and their issues are delivered quickly all around the world. We've had great difficulty moving through the postal bureacracy to get any answers at all, meeting with everything from utter indifference to blatant hostility to postal reps who refuse to give out their names or locations because of "security purposes."

We're not giving up on this and we will continue to try and find that person in the system who cares enough to do something about this. In the meantime, we ask our overseas subscribers to continue to be patient. You can email subs@2600.com if you want us to resend your issue right away. We're told one of the possible fates of these issues was that they wound up on a boat for surface mail instead of the air mail we paid for. If true, it can take up to 40 days (somehow) for the mail to arrive. If this were to happen, it would still suck but it would save us a fortune in remailing costs. If by the middle of February these issues are still missing, we're going to go ahead and remail them all at our own expense.

We apologize for this nonsense that the postal authorities are putting us all through. We're open to any help or advice our readers (domestic or overseas) can offer in resolving this. And of course, if you're overseas and you DID receive your issue, please let us know.