I Hate the Post Office

I have done business with many different post offices and I can honestly say I have never encountered one that I liked. Which is strange, you know, because when you think about it even the worst establishments will have their model outposts, places where they do it just a bit differently - go out of their way with regards to service in an effort to distinguish their location as "the best" - and it works, somewhere in the world. You might hate Subway's sandwiches but then you find one that is just right - so much so that it lets you overlook just how terrible their sandwiches are - and it's refreshing, so you go there again and again.

"For the last time - I don't want mayo on my goddamn hamburgers!"

Not so with post offices. They just get worse every time you step foot into a new one. Every time you change your identity and hitchhike over to a new city with a substandard stance on pedophile registry and walk into a post office where you've never been before it's still and truly the worst place you've ever been. And this is a place where you go in with a potentially 2 minute transaction that winds up taking at least 20 minutes. You walk out a changed person. And not in the beneficial way where your childhood traumas and criminal records are magically wiped clean, but in a prison shower kind of way. In fact studies have shown that post offices are second only to prisons in how powerless, compromised and violated they make you feel. Basically the opposite of what the t.v spots would have you believe. You know the ones: closeup on a customer's beaming face as he hands over a package; the postal worker's perfectly white grin and warm, welcoming demeanor as she takes it and completes the transaction without once breaking eye contact. In fact I have never seen a government worker smile. Never. 

"I make so much more money than all you bitches!!"

Now here I will contest that I have been to the far and away worst post office you have ever seen and it is located in the Dominican Republic of NYC, USA. And, keep in mind, I live in a fairly progressive, well-off place. It just so happens that the specific neighborhood of this place is not so progressive or well-off. Now the post office in question is housed in quite a large building. Which is good because it is always packed like a sardine can full of sweaty hippos. Any smaller of a space and there would be injuries. Like you'll see from time to time on the subway during rush hour. I mean if you walked in with asthma, bronchitis or a mild cold you would almost surely die of asphyxiation.

First class is the only way to go.

If you went there in the middle of the day you might just turn around and go home because all the gates are decidedly drawn down over the long sooty windows. It's like they don't want your business at all. But the masses are not fooled. The lines are long, and start at about half past 8 or about 1 hour before the clerks start working, and tend to stretch all the way back to the front door, snaking in on themselves like diabetic paper clips or crop circles if crop circles were made up of rheumy slack-jawed inbreeds. All too often you come through the door and find yourself right at the very end of the line. And then everyone turns around to look at you cross, as if they've never seen a white person before.

"You want stamps with that?"

Near the entrance is the automated self-serve postage machine. You can buy stamps and mail your parcels without standing on line. It rarely gets used though due to two primary factors. One (1) The size of your package must fit into the maw of the parcel box, which is tighter than a Bell-Air girl on vacation in Baltimore, and this, of course, greatly limits your choices. Especially during the holiday season for your annual mass-mailing of handmade Sybians. And two (2) Who the hell knows how to use computers anyway? Seriously, these people can't even figure out the most user-friendly, talk-you-down, touchscreen, foolproof, 1-braincell-or-less human interface machines. This is why the bank ATM's are the second worst place to find yourself in my neighborhood. But this, dear reader, is the quintessential American Dream. And it's a goddamn nightmare.

The American Dream: Freedom to be yourself.
(And everybody else can go fuck themselves.)

Now, I consider myself a moderate and patient person. Call it an evolutionary byproduct of being a wimp. But encounter me at the post office and I'm a Hell's Angel. i.e: Don't fuck with me at the post office. The post office, like the DMV is a goddamn time warp. Every minute feels like ten as your eyes bore a hole into the backs of old ladies standing at the teller window, speaking a language the teller simply does not understand. And god forbid I have to pee. Because when I wait on the long snaking line for 20 minutes before finally the morbidly obese 50-something career postal worker with the lisp declares in his disinterested monotone that I want the other long snaking line for my issue I am about ready to bite someone's ear off.

"Keep that crazy SOB away from me;
he's been inside a government facility!"

I must say this about bureaucratic due process in general, governmental institutions in particular: the funny thing is that everyone always complains about how the bureaucrats are rude, disinterested and offensively ugly and how every miniscule issue becomes an exercise in downright idiocy, but what you don't figure - and this is my one concession on the topic - is that part of the reason the bureaucrats got this way is that customers just like you are rude, pushy, impatient, haughty and stupid. Please Note: As in nature so in government, equilibrium will eventually be reached.

Truly, a meeting of equals.

There will come when this rant will be far and away obsolete; a generation which will no longer know the trials of waiting in line for their mail as if they have nothing better to do, never boil with rage watching the teller behind the 6 inch-thick glass make his way carefully over without their package in hand, taking steps like a prowling alley cat, never face-palm discreetly when they realize they're standing behind a flock of old women who don't speak English and wish to purchase a dozen money orders. Just like the present generation will never know a time without internet or reality T.V or paying at least twice what their shitty apartment is worth in rent every month. Truly, we live in an age of rusty patina.