Friday, March 27, 2009

Three Miserable Places

There are three businesses that absolutely test my patience. I'm not a very patient person, anyway, but when I go to a fast food establishment, the bank or the U.S. Post Office, my forehead gets sweaty and I get very, very tense. Some of it is my fault. The bank has the same impact on me as reading an insurance policy: B-O-R-I-N-G! When I go to Wendy's I invariably go to the shortest line which happens to be behind the band director for the University of Purdue and he's taking orders for 115 band members. It's always the same; short line, long stay.
Today, I went to the post office in Dublin, Ohio. There are three work stations at this facility. My theory is the number of workers at each station is directly DISproportional to the number of people standing in line. As an example, if there are four people in line all the stations will be in working order. Except, when it's my turn to do my thing then that one worker decides to take a lunch or potty break. Now, if there are, say 30 people in line, two of the workers, just to irritate us all, will leave and then we're stuck with one. This happened today. Another thing about Dublin; we are a diverse community. Since the first Honda plant was established close to our city limits we have a slug of Japanese. In addition, we have quite a few citizens from Pakistan. I don't know why Prince Harry got in trouble with insensitivity for calling them paki's but he did. In his honor I'll do the same. At my post office one of the workers is Japanese with a very distinct Nipponese dialect. More often than not I get this guy and, today, it happened again. He'll ask me a question and my answer is always, "Huh"? I can say, 'huh" with ten different voice inflections. It's something I've learned. After awhile I just say, "write it down".
Just prior to my discourse with the postal worker, he had to work with a lady who was a 'paki'. It would have been hilarious had it not been so sad; Two people with an attitude, barely speaking the language, arguing over zip codes and I have to decide whether or not to referee. I finally figured since they were originally from the same hemisphere they could work it out themselves.
While standing in line I had another thought. I looked behind me and saw fifteen folks of whom twelve had to be over age sixty.
I suppose many states have senior citizen discounts; 10% or something like that. Ohio does. It's called a Senior Buckeye card. In addition to having the discount card I'd like to have another common sense procedure. I'll call them "quick lines" and they're for folks who are 60-70, 71-80, 81-85, and then an 'automatically go to the head of the line' after age 85. I see these young kids in my line with all the rest of us and I want to yell at them, "hey, time is running out on me. That's why some of us don't buy green bananas". These kids have an entire lifetime to stand and wait while those of us in the "check out generation" are living on borrowed time. I don't want to be breathing my last at the the US Postal Service when I could be sitting on a downtown street corner park bench checking out the ladies.

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