Going Postal

Being an objective and sober assessment of the people you encounter on line at the Post Office.

I love the Post Office. I think it’s frankly amazing that you can stuff something into an envelope, pay a small fee, and it shows up at its intended location a few days later. I find it incredible that you can literally get every detail wrong in the address and somehow the letter still arrives. Sure, the Post Office has problems, I won’t deny it. It requires like 15 minutes to mail a single thing to Europe, for example, so god help your immortal soul if you have, say, five things to mail to Europe. Still! I am amazed.

I understand why people hate the Post Office, however. The lines, the forms, the often unfriendly people who work there—I get it. We live in an age of wonders, and yet I have to fill out a customs form by hand and watch while the postal worker keyboards everything I just wrote down into the computer. It’s madness!

The real madness at the Post Office is the people you’re in line with. For real.

Hell’s Waiting Room

I’ve got a lot of experience with the Post Office. I started publishing my zine, The Inner Swine in 1995, and for a while I was mailing several hundred copies of that thing every few months, and I was never sufficiently organized or smart enough to do any kind of bulk mailing. So it was stamps—stamps, motherfuckers!—and envelopes and carting boxes of envelopes to the Post Office. I also used to submit short stories to magazines via mail because I was born so long ago—so very long—that there was no Internet. So I would include a self-addressed-stamped-envelope (SASE) with my submission, and I’d have to get the postal worker to weigh the whole thing and put postage on the SASE as well.

What I mean is, man, I know what it’s like to use the Post Office. And I know the people you meet in line there.

The Amazed Impatient Jackass. The rule is, any time you go to the Post Office and wait in line, someone will walk in, pause for dramatic effect, and say something like ‘I can’t believe this.’ They will then proceed to sigh every few seconds, mutter under their breath about the unbelievable length of the line, the stupidity of the people working there, and how the universe is generally speaking a torture device calibrated especially for them. They will often make phone calls so they can complain about the line to other people in real time. When they get to the window, there is a 101% chance they will get a money order.

The Confused. Man, I get it—sometimes the Post Office is inscrutable. There are strange rules and odd forms and sometimes even I get the feeling the guy behind the window is just making that federal law up to fuck with me. But then you have the people who have never in their lives sent a piece of mail, apparently. Here’s a real, actual interaction I once witnessed:

Postal Worker: You have to put a return address too.

Confused: That is the return address.

Postal Worker: … then you have to put the address you want it send to.

Confused: <grumbling> Fine. <scribbles> Here.

Postal Worker: You’ve got to switch them. You’ve got the return address in the ‘to’ line.

Confused: … wat.

I’m not making that up.

The Older Gentleman or Gentlewoman Who’s There to Buy One Stamp but Also to Chat with Everyone. They’re sweet, and I wish them well. But when they get to the window and decide to spend a few minutes telling the postal employee about the nice time they spent on line in a Post Office recently, I want them to burn.

Someday, a few centuries from now, the Post Office will have a real website that enables you to mail things with an App and, I don’t know, probably a teleportation device or perhaps an army of gnomes who will burst from the floorboards and seize your package and fly off on winged monkeys or something[1]. Until then, we’ll have to wait on line.

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[1]Remember: Sufficiently advanced technology may look a lot like gnomes and flying monkeys.