The post office is a crowded long wait in line nightmare at Christmas time at the best of times, but wow, imagine it during the renewed Coved fears. I had run out of stamps and since I like to get sheets of commemorative stamps instead of generic stamps like I could get at the grocery story, I had to go to the post office. Also, I had Christmas cards to mail, so mailing them directly at the post office seemed like there would be a better chance of getting them to their destination in time for Christmas.
The first thing I saw when I went inside were two long lines, one headed toward the business end of the post office and the other headed toward the mail drop/package bin and next to it the self-service machine. But the mail drop/package bin had a notice across it saying “Out of Order”, which was causing consternation for those who had planned on simply dropping in their packages. So essentially that was a line for the self-service machine.
Not being able to mail my Christmas cards at the mail drop, I would be handing them to the person who would sell me the stamps, I now wanted to get into the other line.
I almost needed binoculars in order to see the end of the line. It went all the way down to the farthest end of the post office way past the long rows of P.O. boxes. This was because of the rule of keeping your distance from others, six feet apart. I realized that it probably wasn’t any more crowded than normal (for Christmas), it just looked like it, because people in the line had to be so spread apart. It was a peculiar “psy-op” in that it looked impossible and it was that visual impression that demoralized the people. That and having to wear the masks, of course, which means lining up in an impossible situation surrounded by unhappy people whose faces you can’t fully see and therefore emotionally “read”, coupled with a sense held by some that everyone else in there was a carrier of contagion. Because of all of this, it felt to me like we were cattle in a line for slaughter.
Knowing that this was going to take some time, I settled into observing all that was going on around me. I watched people come into the front door and then look up and down the two long lines and realize what they were in for. Many of them couldn’t grasp that whichever of the lines they wanted was really that far down (I swear, it was like being at the DMV), as if their vision simply didn’t extend that far. So they would step into the line between two people social distancing not too far from the entrance door that was in actuality in the front 1/3 of the line. Of course they would be told, “The line is down there” and they were forced to look way down to where the ends of the lines really were. They would stand there helpless for a while, as if pondering whether they could actually manage remaining where they had butted in (can you fight a person whose face you can't fully see?), or was it even worth staying in the post office at that time. But soon enough social pressure squeezed them out and they crept on down to the end of line.
Every once in a while it would be an extremely elderly person who would come in and perform that “getting into the line too far forward” and when it began to happen to me, a wave of guilt washed over me, wondering if maybe I had a social duty to let them take my place in line while I went all the way down to the end of the line. It didn’t seem to me that these people could stand very long and therefore needed the courtesy of being allowed to butt in, somewhat like giving your seat to an elderly person on a crowded bus (and in Los Angeles, EVERY bus is crowded, which means that no man ever gets to sit), but as this was a “new” morality that I hadn’t so far evaluated, and due to the masks we all were less human anyway, I just stood my ground and defended my place in line. And anyway, periodically giving up my place in line every time an elderly person came in meant that I would never be able to complete my task.
Who I most felt sorry for were the people who came in carrying arms full of packages they wanted to mail. There was quite a lot of that and I figured that normally those packages would have been gifts that they would have brought to the recipients in person, but now that “Christmas was cancelled” and people were forbidden to have Christmas guests, they had to mail the gifts, instead.
One of those burdened with packages was the woman in front of me, who seemed to periodically accost me with evil eyes peering over the top of her mask to make sure that I kept my distance from her as by this time waves of people kept flowing between us since we were now at the level of the entrance door. It was very tiresome for me to have to constantly jockey my position to accommodate the stream of people coming in the door, attempting to butt in front of me, and keep an acceptable distance from the package-laden women in front of me.
But who had it worse was an elderly man waiting in the self-service line holding too many small packages. Finally his arms gave out and he dropped the whole load onto the floor. As he was close to me, I felt that I should help him pick them all up, but I imagined him being horrified by my attempt to help, “Don’t you TOUCH these, don’t you know there is a pandemic going on!”, but he solved the problem for me by just leaving them on the floor and shuffling them forward with his feet.
This led my awareness to the area of the self-serve machine and I saw strangers helping other strangers figure out how to work it. That was nice. And then somebody realized that the sign indicating that the mail drop/package bin was out of order only applied to the package bin, not the mail drop. So he took it upon himself to re-adjust the sign so that it was clear that it applied only to the package bin. That alone cause five or six people to get out of line, mail their letters, and then leave the post office. Things were now easing up.
Later, a man inside the business end of the post office finished his transaction and as he was walking out, he saw the elderly man shuffling his numerous packages on the floor. He came up to him and pointed out a large cloth bin that was near the counter where he had been. He said, “If you have already put postage on your packages, all you need to do is put them into that bin.” Sure enough, the elderly man had already put postage on his packages, so he hadn’t needed to be in the line for the self-service machine. He thanked the man, shuffled the packages to the cloth bin, put in his packages, and then left!
By now, the woman in front of me felt that we were close enough to the business end of the post office so she stepped ahead and put her packages on the counter that separated the line of people from the post office windows. From then on, when she got back up there, she would just need to keep pushing the packages down the counter until it was her turn to go to one of the windows. When she came back to her place in line in front of me, I said, “That was smart! I had been worried about you holding those heavy packages so long.”
She said, “They weren’t really very heavy, but they were awkward.”
I said, “Yeah, they were tiring to your arms,” and she nodded “that they were.”
Ultimately we got up to the head of the line, and then it was my turn. They had on display numerous commemorative stamps and I said to the post office woman, “I don’t want to take up your time, but which of these do you have on hand.” I knew from experience that they wouldn’t have all of them and with all these people waiting on line, I didn’t want to take a lot of time selecting my stamps.
She pointed to the most colorful one and said, “We have ‘Bugs Bunny’”. I said, “That would be great, let me have a sheet of that one, please.” They were very cute and funny stamps, enough to brighten ones day with a laugh. I paid for them and then showed her the envelopes and said, “Can I give these to you or should I put them into the mail slot?”, referring to the one that we all thought had been out of order but which the helpful man revealed it wasn’t. She said, “Oh, that’s okay, give them to me.”
I was then complete and as I walked out of the post office, I said to a person who had just come in, “The line moves faster than it looks.”
Outside on the parking lot, the woman who had been in front of me in line had her mask off and was backing her car out of its parking space. She saw me, gave me a big smile and a wave. I peeled off my mask, waved back at her, and gave her a hearty “Have a Merry Christmas!”
