Well paid, but still crabby

I like what we used to call the post office, back in the days when its unofficial motto meant something. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Well, that was then. Now, they miss many days and often run late. We used to be a model for the world. Today we are a model for Chile.

I like the post office because it does what I can’t do — get a parcel to someone at a distance — and at a decent price. (The average postal worker makes over $50,000. For that, you think you’d get service with a smile, particularly when you are greeted as a “guest.”)

The service was created by my favorite Founding Father, Ben Franklin.

Why is he my favorite? Well, in addition to being a Revolutionary, he was a newspaperman (the first gossip columnist as Poor Richard), he was good with the ladies and a smooth talker. (He launched the postal service in part because it helped deliver his newspapers. So we learn that having a profit motive is not necessarily a bad thing.)

So there I am at my local post office with a Target bag full of my books that I am mailing out to those who ordered them (including constant posters Vince and Tony). I walked there in a light rain and turned in the books to be weighed and stamped. A couple or three books were damp from the light rain.

I return about three hours later — the books are too heavy for me to handle more than a dozen at a time — and the clerk says, “The books are wet.”

I agree and tell her it is raining. A few books have a some drops on them,

”Why don’t you use a umbrella?”

I hold up my cane. “I have a cane in one hand, a shopping bag of books in the other. How would I hold an umbrella — with my third hand?”

”You could wear an umbrella hat, ” she says, triumphantly.

”That would keep my head dry, but not the books.”

She gives me a look, as if the rain were more inconvenient for her, in her dry cubicle, than it is for me, on the wet street.

I tell her I’ll be back in the afternoon. Maybe it won’t be raining.

P.S.: If you are a regular here, I won’t mind going to the post office for you. Ordering the book is one way of thanking me for this blog. You can use the handsome website

https://www.presscardthebook.com