I'm late, I'm late...

It always seems that it's true that the hurrier you go, the behinder you get. Case in point, going to the post office. I hate to go to the post office. This is not a good thing if you are in the mail order business. One of the best things to come along was the online label service the USPS has now. Or it is when it works. Yesterday, when I had three orders to ship, my printer wouldn't correctly put the indicia needed on the labels, so I had to do it the old fashioned way. By standing in line.

The post office isn't that far from my house, but at 3 PM on a Friday, the traffic around it is heavy. What are they thinking when they only have one person at the window on Friday afternoon, when everyone is in there buying money orders on payday? I'm the third person in line, and the guy in front of me asks about a package that was not delivered to his office. The lone clerk goes over to another part of the office, and I hear her TURN ON A COMPUTER! Jiminy Christmas! Don't they keep their tracking computer online?? Five minutes goes by, and she has still not found this guy's package. Fact was, she never could log on to the site.

By now there are six people in line behind me. Two are having loud conversations on their cellphones. (Another rant, another day.) I have one package that needs to go overseas, and even though I already have the customs form filled out, I have to fill out something else that I didn't have ready, and I have to put the contents in a different envelope because the one I had was not an Express Mail Flat Rate. Nothing is every simple at the post office. Heaven forbid if you get it all done before you get there. And I'm way more prepared than most folks who step up to that counter. Twenty minutes after I walk in, with only two people ahead of me, I get done. I walk out to see another four people have walked in behind those other six and the line is out the door. I mutter under my breath that my timing could have been worse.

I console myself with the fact that the Priority Mail envelopes and boxes are "free", and head home to pack more stuff up to mail the next day. Just hope I can make the printer work.