Self Entitled

This started with a morning trip to the local post office to get change of address forms for summer vacation. After a significant wait in line, since they aren't staffed like they are in December,  I was shooed away. I had to do it online. No more cards. Online only. And they charge for the privilege of not cutting down more trees for their forms. Go figure. It's a whopping $1.10, so keep your credit card handy.

After a stint at the club, I went home and started looking for the proper forms. It can be tricky. And boy oh boy, don't make any typos. They are flatly unforgiving of those. But after a while I finally muddled through, got my confirmation number which I wrote down where important info like that goes, and called it an accomplishment.

A bit later Steve woke up, and I encouraged him to do what I'd done, promising him whatever help he needed. It was immediately frustrating. He couldn't find any forms for what he needed. It turned out he needed to Google the name of the form before USPS to get access to the proper form. There were other stumbles along the way, some of which I'd already made and knew exactly what to fix. When he got to the end, he got his email with his confirmation number, again duly noted. However, unlike my email, he also got instructions to go the post office in person with a barcode and two forms of photo ID to verify he was himself and had authorization to forward his own mail. So... after kicking me out, they're making him come in?

He couldn't get a photo of the barcode and couldn't bring his laptop, so I took a shot of it and off we went. Frustration levels were extremely high at that point, so I reminded him that the PO was a block from MacDonald's and it was past both our lunchtimes. Off we went!

The parking lot was much fuller than this morning. Even though Steve is walking much better these days, I hoped that there was more than the one person like in the morning waiting on customers in the afternoon. He did too. It was while we were waiting in line for one of now two postal workers that the fun began. 

First, a petite woman had a huge canvas sack of mail plus spillover, large envelopes each full of what looked to be multiple half inch thick reports, not all sealed so we saw inside, but all heading to the same place. Over more than 10 minutes, up on the scale they were piled, while those of us watching waited for the entire stack to tumble and scatter. Oops, she forgot some special number that gave her a cheaper rate, so off to the car for it she went, thus going from being the fun to missing the real "fun".

This time it started in the front of the line. A man started chiding the woman now in front of him for going around him for first place in the line. He'd been waiting for a while to get to the head of the line. She wasn't going to budge. After all, she was busy, had important places to go after mailing out her packages. (That's an actual excuse these days? So who didn't have better places to be?) She started rudely arguing with the man she'd passed in the line, various ways of insisting she was more important... because she was more important. No "I'm sorry for butting in", no "Do you mind if...?", just something finally about he'd just been standing there (behind another woman in line in front of him) so she went ahead. I guess he'd been doing the current version of social distancing, maintaining a foot of space to the next person, but  she took it as privilege.

The window opened up and she went over. We were left to comment on her behavior, while she made loud nasty comments back while also dealing with her task.  Some of them implied threats, like how dangerous it could be these days to get people angry. She was so out there that we just shrugged at each other, probably mentally wondering if she was a "Karen",  and declared her to be self entitled. In the process we in line bonded slightly, eventually going our separate ways. 

Our way was to lunch, right after Steve's address change ID was accepted. An email was waiting for him at home making it official.

Oh, I bypassed the MacDonald's when Steve got his standard choice there, and hit the Arby's next door for my lunch, I wanted to try one of the bourbon BBQ sandwiches. Yum! Except, really: did they have to put pickles in it?