It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [14]
Turns out it was, in fact, true, and I acted smug and felt like I had beaten the Mean Lady at her own game while standing in line at the post office downtown, despite the fact that it had taken me a half hour to snag one of the jumble of metered street spaces. Because this post office doesn’t have a parking lot. At all. And because the nineteen people in front of me in line, who had all probably been banned from the satellite station, had gotten there first.
Unlike at the drugstore post office, there is nothing to look at while you wait in line—no fake poo, no pirate condoms, no crime-scene action, nothing to distract you from the other Eugene residents and fellow post-office patrons and their packages. It was then that I saw some amazing things.
For example, I witnessed a lady trying to cram a pound of pistachios and a pound of corn nuts into one regular, letter-sized Priority Mail envelope. I couldn’t figure out where that lady could possibly be sending corn nuts where there aren’t corn nuts ALREADY, unless there was a corn-nut-less province that I was unaware of. And at two pounds in a Priority envelope, it was going to cost her more money to send corn nuts someplace than the corn nuts cost in the first place (unless she was sending them to a prison, but even then, I’ll bet corn nuts are a staple in the vending machines). She ripped through three Priority envelopes before the man behind her pointed out that a box would be a better fit and there were several options eight inches away from her right foot at the center counter, which she was leaning on. She tossed the envelope aside and went in for a box, which easily fit her snack foods, but her delight soon turned to unbridled horror when she attempted to close it. Immediately, she began to complain that the box, which was free, courtesy of the post office, was not equipped with “automatic tape,” which I think meant “adhesive strip” to those people who don’t buy corn nuts by the pound. I then saw two different women with the same unique bear-claw tattoo and a middle-aged woman with bangs cut from the middle of one ear to the middle of the next, who never closed her mouth the entire time she stood in line, which, by the way, was long enough to hatch an egg. From any species.
In addition to the automatic-tape debacle, almost everyone in line had some sort of mail disaster to contend with, whether it was trying to ship vast amounts of liquids and perishable items (how long does it take for a corn nut to perish, anyway? Is it even within the realm of possibilities? I bet corn nuts have been found in the tombs of Egyptian royalty and still taste exactly the same when unearthed), sealing a box up with Scotch tape, or arguing that a customs form was not needed for her package, “because it’s just going to Italy.”*
The next time I had to go to the post office, I went to the branch rumored to have a parking lot, hoping to avoid the downtown contingent and tattoo museum. And I did and was confronted with people who had been unemployed for a long, long time, so long that they had lost perspective of the phrase “time frame” in any conceivable meaning, even though I could easily measure the duration of their life span left on Earth with my fingers. For example, at this post office, I waited in line behind patrons who liked to round out every money-exchanging transaction with a nice, pointless conversation about a) are Disney stamps more expensive than regular stamps; b) what is the difference between a book of stamps and a sheet of stamps; and c) if they write a check, can they write it over the amount and get seven dollars and forty-two cents back?
It was then that I realized it completely wasn’t fair for anyone to say ever again that post office employees are slightly askew, because if you were dealing with morons demanding