Trip to the Post Office
I had to go down to the post office to mail a small package. What should have been a 10-minute errand (including drive time) turned into a 30-minute disaster, the likes of which haven’t been witnessed on this planet since the sinking of the Lusitania.
A few years ago, the post office installed a gigantic kiosk-machine that allows you to automatically do what you normally have to wait in line for years and have someone else do. It has a handy scale, prints out all the postage, and has a gigantic slot to put bulky packages and stuff into. It’s a massive time-saver because so many people fear technology, meaning there’s rarely a line to use the machine. I don’t mean to sound overly detailed or condescending, but I feel the need to explain because I do not believe these machines exist in every post office (for instance, another post office 10 minutes in the other direction doesn’t have one).
So I go to the machine, and I find two little kids, maybe six or seven years old, playing around with the machine, with no adult supervision anywhere to be found. When they first installed the machine, they had a random postal employee sit on a little stool to make sure people used it correctly. I wished someone like that had been around, but alas…
I said to the kids, “Excuse me,” trying to sound polite, gruff, and irritated at the same time.
Both of them turned around, stared at me slackjawed, then resumed their fucking around with the machine.
I don’t know the social etiquette of dealing with little kids. Honestly, it almost never comes up. I just know that I don’t want to be accused of something unsavory or illegal by following my heart and grabbing those kids and shoving them out of the way. So I just kinda…stood there, and contemplated whether or not I should just get in the damn line.
Fortunately, a few moments after I showed up, a kindly old postal employee came up next to me. We exchanged confused/annoyed looks, and then he tried in his kindly-old-man way to coax the kids away from the machine, or at least find out who they came to the post office with. They finally admitted they were waiting for “Mommy,” but they refused to move.
The kindly old man went into the waiting room and called, “Anybody out here got two kids waiting? We got an SOS.”
I shit you not — the mom was standing there, but she pretended not to hear. I watched her tense up with potential embarrassment even before she turned — after the postal clerk sighed and turned his back on her — and started making shooing motions at her apathetic kids.
I hate to get on my old-man soapbox and complain about parenting skills, but what else can I do? In my day, my mom would have smacked the shit out of my sister and me — publicly and awesomely and deservedly — if we had behaved like this. But, in fact, we wouldn’t have even gotten the chance, because she would have forced us to wait with her through the whole line, no matter how long and boring it seemed. And, hell, even if she had hypothetically let us run loose, we were well-trained enough by that age to know that if we were doing something flagrantly wrong, and Grown-Ups wanted us to stop, we’d fucking stop. To that end, I seemed to recall people in kindly-old-man authority positions being fucking assholes. None of this mamby-pamby, “Would you mind letting this gentleman use the machine, please?” Fuck that, man. I have vivid memories of balding men with snooty voices barking orders at me, and you know what? I deserved it, and I knew I deserved it. And again, in a hypothetical land where a situation had escalated to the point where a kindly old man came searching for my mom, she would have gotten out of line to deal with it, and I probably would have gotten the shit smacked out of me twice — once for misbehaving, once for making her have to wait in the line a second time.
Kids these days need to get smacked. Repeatedly. So do parents.
Posted by Stan on August 8, 2008 1:39 PM | Permalink | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation | Digg It
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