The Sharpened Spoon

I despise postal carriers. Or, rather, I love the idea of it but the reality wears me a little thin. It seems that I have somehow ended up on the bad side of the entire United States Postal Service. The neighborhood in which I reside with my lovely wife and seven gorgeous children is far from posh, so we have a dog, actually one big and two little dogs. Every now and then one of my more brilliant than average children will leave the door open and Lucy, my son Asher’s boxer that everyone mistakes for a pitbull, will go charging out the door. There has never been a time to my knowledge that she was not immediately reined in and she certainly has never threatened the postman except from a very great distance. So they decide to revoke a piece of my citizenship, like a package delivery version of the soup nazi, no mail for you they say.

Only there’s the problem they don’t even have to come out and say it, they just stop delivering and threaten to “never deliver mail to that address ever again.” So I call consumer affairs, which of course is manned by electronic recorded voices of actors trained to sound as condescending as humanly possible and they inform me in their best kindergarten teacher English that my only option is to speak my full mailing address and they will send me a complaint form.

You probably see where I am going with this. How can I receive said complaint form when the very people I am trying to complain about are refusing to service my mailbox, which, I might add is located conveniently curbside where they asked us to place it? By now I’ve decide that the system needs to be fixed and do you know that all of those people who are constantly complaining about the same things that irritate you don’t mean a word of it?

Oh sure give them a cup of coffee and a Danish and they can fill volumes with how the government needs to be accountable to the people, but try and mount a crusade to change it and watch how quickly their schedules will fill with truly meaningful things, such as watching paint dry.

The problem isn’t the postal service, or even the government. The problem started in the garden of Eden, that’s right, the world is broken. I some times forget it and wax eloquent about the way things ought to be, as if my thirty years experience in this world were enough to give me the wisdom to fix something that has been progressively headed for core meltdown for the last six millennia, give or take.

So, Monday morning I will toddle myself to the post office,
PObox application in hand and do what I can to make peace with the system. Never mind the empty pepper spray bottles littering the sidewalk in front of my chainlink fence where a spiteful postal employee dropped them after spraying my last dog through said fence making her unfit for young company, after first kicking said fence to get her to charge. Never mind the fact that the last time they did this they never filed a report but rather the carrier kept the mail in his own vehicle until I caught up with him and asked about it, threatened to call the cops and finally got my mail, three days later. Suck it in dude, the world is broken and sometimes the best you can do is not make it any worse.