December 19, 2006 by Amy

Those people

It occurs to me that I have not posted today, and all I can say is, “Well, it’s the week before Christmas.”

Spent my lunch hour today running around trying to tie up loose ends, and ended up only making a big knot out of everything.

I had an experience today which singularly proves to me that the term “going postal” is appropriate. Wouldn’t you think that if you were completely out of the holiday snowflake stamps you’d put a sign up saying so, in order that your customers would not have to wait upwards of 30 minutes to find that out verbally? If you thought that, you would be wrong, and obviously you don’t work at the post office.

When I got there, my number was 95. They were on 66. That should give you an idea of what the atmosphere was like. There were two (!) people working over the noon hour, and the line went out the door. The staff was in no hurry to help anybody, either, not even bothering to advance the little number that gave us the only glimmer of hope that the line was indeed moving.

After waiting a few moments, I reasoned that it wouldn’t be so long after all. As they were calling numbers they were jumping three, sometimes four ahead, as folks had gotten tired of waiting and left.

I waited patiently, looking all over the room for any indication that they might be out of the stamps I was there to buy. I even checked the automatic stamp dispenser thingy in the lobby. No such luck. All thirty slots were filled with the generic American flag stamps.

I finally got up to the front of the line and asked the employee how many of the snowflake stamps there were in a book, so I could figure out how many books to purchase. She barked:

“WE’RE OUT OF SNOWFLAKES. WE HAVE KWANZAA AND HANUKKAH. NEXT!”

I went from being a perfectly reasonable and intelligent young lady to a seething ball of anger and fury in two seconds flat. I spit out, “You need to POST A SIGN” before storming out in a huff. I couldn’t believe I had just wasted 30 minutes for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Stef asked me later why I hadn’t just purchased the regular American flag stamps, saying, “Oh, you’re one of those people who have to have the holiday stamps on their Christmas cards.”

I suppose I am one of those people (are we really that bad?!), but even if I weren’t, I darn sure wasn’t going to spend any money there. Not that it matters, as it all goes into the same big pot of ill-use and waste, but it was the principle of the matter.

Many thanks go out to M who then went to the PO by his work and purchased, in less than fifteen minutes, our snowflake stamps.

So, everyone take a moment to enjoy those precious snowflake stamps on our Christmas cards this year, knowing the background story that went into purchasing them. Then toss the envelope in the trash or recycle bin and forget about it. I really need to stop being one of those people, don’t you think?