2007
walked the sand with the crustaceans
maura @ 10:17 pm
Usually I am all about elaborating on the fantasticness of living in New York City, but today I am here to tell you about one mighty horrendous aspect of city livin’: the post office.
Over the summer I went to the post office near my mom’s house in the suburbs, and I was completely amazed. Flabbergasted, even. No lines! Everyone friendly and smiling! In and out in 5 minutes! Even with media mail!
Nope, that’s not the way the post offices are here. Nearly every one I’ve ever been to has the same huge glaring issue: regardless of the time of day that you visit, the lines are seemingly eternal and only 20% of the windows are staffed. I have seriously NEVER waited less than 30 minutes at any post office in NYC.
Also everyone is grumpy. Staff will nitpick about the requirements for media mail with you (I once got into an argument about computer software vs. video games, BOTH of which were on CD!). Patrons have all manner of complex requests including mailing 20 packages at once, drawing up money orders, picking up packages, and getting passport applications.
Post office locations are also weirdly inconvenient here, or have been for us, at least. We’ve lived in 3 different zip codes in Manhattan and 2 in Brooklyn and it’s never taken us less than half an hour to get to the post office. Combine that with the overcrowding and I’m thinking we just need more post offices in the city.
I will admit that things got a little better not long ago when the automated machines were introduced to many post office locations. Though as I found out recently when mailing some ebay + half packages, the machines won’t mail to Canada and do not do media mail. So it’s back to the eternal line for those items.
Today’s post office outing took the cake. I went with a media mail item, thinking that if the line was crazy I’d just eat the extra ca$h and pop it in the automated machine. But there was no machine! How medieval! Okay, so I have to schlepp that package around the whole day, blargh.
But we needed stamps too so I headed over to the stamp machine. No credit cards: okay, I’ll use paper money. I tried to put in two $5 bills, only to discover that you can only put ONE piece of money in, then you had to make your selection and get the change! And once you put the money in the largest number of stamps you could select was 10! So I put in $5, bought 10 stamps ($4.10), then bought 2 stamps with the remaining money.
THEN the machine spat the stamps out one by one in a long line, and they were lickable, not self-adhesive! Who knew they even made those kind of stamps these days? SO last century.
