“Post Office”

So last spring I paid the post office $1 to forward my mail to New York, where I spent the summer. They never forwarded a damn thing, and now I’m back at the same L.A. address. However, somehow they recently decided it would be fun to start forwarding only a randomly selected sample of my Netflix discs and nothing else. It took me a while to catch on, but then yesterday I headed over to the local Post Office to try to clear things up. I talked to three different employees who gave me three different sets of instructions. In somewhat Goldilocks-esque fashion, one set of instructions was obviously wrong, one set was probably wrong, and one set was possibly correct. I followed the possibly correct set of instructions. Fingers crossed.

Also at the post office was a painfully earnest student, obviously a freshman and obviously new to life in South Central L.A. (or maybe just to life in general). He went up to the window and loudly inquired, “CAN I BUY STAMPS HERE?” They explained to him that he could, hence the term “Post Office.” He said, “DO YOU HAVE ONES WITH BASEBALL PLAYERS?” They gave him a sheet of stamps with baseball players. He said, “DO YOU ACCEPT HUNDRED DOLLAR BILLS?” I cringed and glanced around the post office, which is home to a colorful assortment of characters, such as the homeless guy with two-inch long fingernails. It was all I could do not to grab the kid by the shoulders, shake him, and shout, “KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN! ARE YOU TRYING TO GET US ALL KILLED?”