Lost

The travel agent had given up, there were no tickets from San Francisco to India, but luckily Singapore Airlines sales were able to get one for me with a marginal cost, as always I had a very good experience with them and was very happy with the very thought of being back to my home and to meet my parents. I had planned for this trip from a long time and everything was going smoothly. Until a mistake from my company's mailing department, resulted with my passport lost. They had mistakenly posted a mail with no address, containing my passport and as a standard US Postal mail for which there is no tracking available.

It hurts.

Anyhow, according to wikipedia, posts with no mailing address go to a Mail Recovery System, located in Minnesota, where mails are opened in person and routed back if they find mailing information. Again this entire process can take from few weeks to few months.
Few things to note about US Postal
-- 100's of mails get lost everyday and never reach their destination
-- Standard shipping can get as long as 2 weeks to reach from one place to another, forget about getting it back.
-- Mail Recovery Center gets around 7000 mails everday. I am not sure how much is the back lag.

These things make me jittery.

The other option ie to get a duplicate passport is not big of a issue, since it takes few days, the main problem is getting all the visa's, stamped which might take months. Probably, I will wait for sometime before I go for a duplicate one.

This is a very good example of how a small mistake can lead to a very very big problem.