Going Postal

Houston as we know is a very international city. That's one of the things I most love about living in such a large metropolis. Every so often I am vividly reminded of that fact.

I had to go into the post office near my office yesterday. Usually I can just drive through and drop off mail. Yesterday, however, I was mailing some wedding photos to my Mom in a big ol' envelope and had to stand in line inside.

As I was standing there counting the minutes of my life I'll never get back; I started listening to the people around me. Two women were speaking in an African dialect, the woman in front of me was talking into her cell phone Borg ear mic in an Asian language, the woman behind me was talking on her cell in a different Asian language and the man at the counter was on his cell phone speaking in Spanish. Then a man came quickly through the door and directly to the counter. With a very thick Arabic accent he was demanding that the post office employees move their cars so his delivery trucks could park where they were.

The post office employees said that was their assigned parking and they wouldn't move them. He insisted a bit more forcefully and the entire post office business came to a skreeching halt. For almost 10 full minutes all other conversations came to a stop as we listened to the three tellers and the neighboring business owner with parking issues repeat the same things over and over.

"You must move your cars as I need to park my delivery trucks there to load them!"
"No, they're our assigned spots."
"We've parked there for years and the other owner of your business never had trouble loading his trucks."
"You need to take it up with the building management as these are our assigned spots."

Rinse - repeat.

Soon the appearant post office manager came out and directed the parking spot wrangler outside to show her what it was he needed. Whew! Now we can get our packages mailed.

No, the three tellers had to keep talking about what just happened and how they were determined not to move their cars until they were assigned other spots and that they didn't want those spots to be too far away because they weren't gonna walk around to the back of the building in the dark. (Like the post office is ever open when it's dark.)

Good grief.

Finally the African American woman who was next in line shouted, "Can ya'll get back to work now and let us get on with our lives?" She finger snapped and head bobbed and without missing a beat the tellers went back to their windows and we got on with our lives in the big city.