Post Office Blues

The Man's computer died last week. Power surge, bad battery back-up, motherboard... I don't know. Whatever. He was not happy.

He's been using my our laptop this week while we waited for his new motherboard to make its merry journey clear across the world from China.

Today I went to pick it up from the post office. We live in an interesting area. It's podunk that is sort of not as podunk as it used to be and now becoming sort of a populated area. Our post office is still podunk, though. We don't have fancy automatic postal machines or vending machines for stamps. We have a line and a counter with two less than thrilled postal employees behind it.

So I stood in the line and observed the people. One of the postal employees was busy weighing and stamping about a kajillion identical looking envelopes for one mom whose fourish year old son looked like he was going to lose his little head if he had to wait one - second - longer.

He tugged on her, he stood on his tip toes, he sat on the floor, he jumped up and down, he looked at the people in line, he picked his nose. His mother corrected him.

"Get up, Johnny. Stop that, Johnny. Do you want a sticker? Don't pull on me, Johnny. Can I have my pen back, Johnny?"

The other postal employee was trying to be polite to a woman in scrubs who was rudely ignoring her. She was carrying possibly the most irritating fake Coach bag I've ever seen and browsing through a tabloid magazine while standing at the counter. The postal worker kept asking her things like "Would you like this to go Priority for $5.45 or First Class for $3.42?" and she would just barely hear her and make her repeat herself and then nod or "mmhmm..." her answer.

I wanted to smack her and her fake purse from the line. But I try not to be judgemental.

Finally, she was done. The postal worker said "Have a nice day!" and she said "mmhmm..." and picked up her fake bag and left with her Star magazine.

We moved up in line.

Johnny was still antsy.

The next woman was very concerned that she was taking up too much time because she needed boxes and CD mailers and had to address everything. She fretted. I wanted to tell her it was no big deal. I felt bad for her.

She didn't take as long as she thought she was taking. Johnny's mom was still there.

After a few more patrons it was my turn. I showed identification, I signed my name, I printed my name, I verified my address, I offered my first born, I gave them a vial of blood... and then finally they released The Man's brand new motherboard.

I told her to have a nice day and waved good bye to Johnny, who looked longingly at me with a "Take me with you..." look.

At home I presented The Man with his new toy fancy piece of hardware. When he opened it his eyes lit up. So happy. :) After a few hours of work I'm happy to say that The Man is back in business.